Betty Crocker Broke Recipes by Shrinking Boxes

A pet peeve of mine is tissues/toilet paper/paper towels. Sometimes the price is "per roll", sometimes it is "per sheets". Sometimes it's even different between different package sizes of the same product. It's infuriating to have to bust out the calculator to figure out if the deal on the 6 pack is a better price than the regular priced 12 pack.

I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.

I've been much happier since I started weighing everything.

1. Emulsifiers actually make the texture better

2. The flour they use has had some extra steps

3. They can use industrial machinery to smash their shortening and flour together in a way that's really not possible in a kitchen, that does make the texture better.

As someone else has said, it should in theory be possible to buy "better" flour; and you could buy emulsifiers, or use more egg yolk (which has a natural emulsifier), or use Crisco (which the video says has emulsifiers in it). So it's really the last one that's not easily replicate-able at home.

There is one thing he keeps repeating which I disagree with: "You're not going to be able to do a better job of engineering than the experts at Duncan Hines." Yes, both Duncan Hines and I are optimizing in part for taste. And I have some constraints compared with Duncan Hines: I don't have industrial grade machinery to mash shortening into flour; I can't experiment with and precisely measure an arbitrary number of potentially exotic ingredients.

But Duncan Hines has several additional constraints they're optimizing against which don't apply to me: They have to make it simple enough for an average person to make. They have to aim for a "median" palate. They have to make it shelf-stable for years. They have the pressure to shave pennies off the cost (as evidenced by TFA), which may mean (e.g.) buying cheaper chocolate or using a lightly lower quality fat than would be ideal.

So I disagree that it's a given that Duncan Hines' cake mix will be better than something I can make from scratch.

I will, however, concede that there are reasonable advantages to using a "commercial base".

But I'm not sure why they think I can't but the same emulsifiers etc online or at the local Asian grocery store.

I'm not disagreeing since taste is subjective, and for blind taste tests I could definitely see most people choosing what they are used to which would probably be box mixes. I'd be interested to see if culturally it's different since I think box mixes are generally more popular in the USA.

Most 'proper' baking needs a scale, and how many American kitchens have that?

If you bake from scratch, then maybe your results won’t be as good at first, but like anything else you will get better with experience and improve with time.

Like, would you suggest people only eat frozen TV dinners because the results will be more consistent than if they cooked a meal themselves?

Box mixes use powdered milks. Powdered vanilla flavor. They use the cheapest powdered chocolate. Sometimes they don't even both making you throw in an egg because they use powdered egg.

I don't care how precisely that's measured, it's not going to be as good as my recipe with fresh eggs, fresh milk, real vanilla, and good quality bars of baking chocolate.

And that's even setting aside techniques. My favorite chocolate cake involves pouring boiling water into the ingredients, because of the way it melts the chocolate. Show me a Betty Crocker mix that does that.

Obviously if the only recipe you've seen from scratch is just a replica of the things in the box (and you use similarly low-quality ingredients) then sure, having the precise measurements is nice, I guess.

If I use my eggs from neighbor's chickens, fancy chocolate, and organic milk from a local dairy, the cake is going to taste better (90% from the better chocolate honestly).

Quality improvements are easy.

Consistency is harder, but anyone with a kitchen scale and half an eye for detail should be able to pull it off. It takes me 3 or 4 goes at a recipe before I get super consistent with it, but it isn't rocket science (which also demands consistency!)

> What about a smaller cake or bigger one?

Boxes don't help here since their cooking instructions are for a fixed dimension, changing the cake size significantly for even boxed cakes requires understanding what you are doing. Again, not hard, but it isn't a win for box cakes.

Separate yolk and white (as though you were going to beat the whites). Weigh both, reduce both by 30%. Recombine.

Better is to just base the entire recipe off the weight of the egg.

Start with the egg(s), scale everything else to match. 50g egg? Cool you get even increments of 50g, 100g, etc. 48g egg? Weigh out 96g instead of 100g of the other ingredient.