During the previous round of shirkflation I warned people about knowing what year a recipe was from because “a can” means something different in 2004 than in 2010. And now it means something different again in 2025.
Now boxes are getting the shrink treatment too.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/618032
I hit this with the chocolate banana cheesecake I posted here last week.
I’ve been making variants of it for some 30 years now, and while most of the ingredients are raw ingredients, it does call for an entire 12 ounce bag of miniature chocolate chips. You have to use mini chips because of the low baking temp, full size chips don’t melt all the way and give it a weird texture.
Imagine my surprise last week to find that Nestle morsels only come in 10 and 20 ounce bags now.
Fortunately, the STORE brand was still a standard 12 ounces and the recipe still works. Fine. I didn’t want to give Nestle the money anyway. ;)
It’s always best when you can avoid funding Nestle
If you’re going to use ounces you either make the result divisible by 4 or you use fucking metric. 10 in ounces defeats the entire point of 16 ounces in a pound. Fucking 5/8ths of a pound. Great unit of sale, very useful.
At least if I bought the 20 ounce bag, that’s divisible by 4, and taking out 12, leaves 8… but still…
Baking shouldn’t start with a Tower of Hanoi puzzle.
And if it was an 8 ounce bag you could easily scale the recipe with the ratios since you’re using 1/2 lb chips instead of 3/4 lb. But this 5/8ths shit is just asinine.
I’d cry if I had to tower of hanoi every time I started up my stand mixer!
That’s pretty much my life every time I need a pot from the cabinet, shifting and stacking.
What happened to grandmothers cooking and baking from normal ingredients, using handwritten recipes collected on papers randomly stuck into an old cook book?
Grandma grew up in the 80s eating microwave dinners. She never learned to cook.
The 80s? Ma’am you have the wrong decade.
That explains the recipe, yes.
Well…
World War 1 happened. there was rationing.
Then the 20’s happened and grandmothers disappear from the historical record, they either became flappers or were shot to death with a Thompson submachine gun in a speakeasy. RIP roaring 20’s grandmas.
Then the Great Depression happened and the only foodstuffs that existed were peanut butter and saltine crackers.
Then World War 2 happened, there was rationing again.
Rationing ended in 1947, and basically everything in America changes. GI’s returning from war 1. fuck the fucking fuck out of the women, resulting in more pregnancies than Earth had ever seen before. There’s a housing boom, they skin the continent of old growth pine to build suburbs, with adjacent business districts full of supermarkets complete with large parking lots for the family car. These supermarkets are full of mass manufactured packaged food, some of which use technologies developed for military rations. We enter the era of the boxed cake mix, the canned cake icing, and the frozen TV dinner. All of this is new and exciting, and the marketing poses industrial made foods such as shortening as more scientific and purified than natural food.
I got this from a comment under a Youtube video, responding to why Jello was so popular in the 1960’s: Because a gelatin mold was seen as an impressive feat of housewifery. Much earlier than 1960 and gelatin is a pain in the ass to make but now that it’s a commercial product that comes in a box, you pour the packet into some hot water and stir and bam, it became quite a trend. The same happened with cake. Pour a box of powder in a bowl, dump in 2 cups of water, stir it a little and then pour into pans and bake. Betty Crocker had to take the egg powder back out of the mix because market research showed housewives felt underwhelmed, baking with all-in-one mix didn’t feel like enough of a project. So make them provide their own eggs I guess.
So the Greatest Generation, my grandparents, bake like that. Because all the hip keen 25 year olds are baking like this, MOM, I can make a whole cake in an hour, I’m icing while you’re still sifting that flour. That’s how they teach their boomer daughters how to bake, and the average boomer housewife is at a loss as to how to bake a cake without a box of Betty Crocker.
Gen X has never and will never exist.
Millennial women seem have a complicated relationship to baking. On the one hand, there’s an entire genre of television/Youtube about baking cakes aimed pretty much at millennial women. Find me a woman in her 30’s that doesn’t have a strongly formed opinion on fondant. That’s what they watch when they’re temporarily sick of True Crime. On the other hand, feminism’s distaste for women in the kitchen has lead to a lot of women having no discernible cooking skills. I’m a better cook than most of the women I’ve dated, and most of the women I’ve dated I wouldn’t trust to own a sifter or a rolling pin, particularly the city dwelling Democrat voters.
Gen Z? Like they’re ever going to live somewhere with an oven.
Recipes that don’t specify things in grams and millilitres can go screw.
“Now add a traditional american furlong of bushel sauce to the 25 ounce pot until it bubbles up by five and a smidge horse hands” … yeah, no 😅
The heating time time on some frozen chicken strips was for “a cup”. Of long frozen pieces of chicken.
My favourite is “one cup of spinach”.
Is a cup not equivalent to 250ml?
It’s the absurdity of specifying a volume for a leaf. A few leaves of spinach can fill a cup or a kilo of leaves can fill 250ml if shredded.
depending on the cup but still, is the spinach pressed or loose? measured before or after chopping?
It’s close, it’s like 236.6mL. A cup is 1/4 of a quart, a quart is a smidge less than a liter. If you’re converting to metric, 1 tsp comes out to ~5mL, 1 Tbsp is ~15mL, 1 fl. oz. is ~30mL, and 1 cup is ~250mL. The proportions will come out about right, you’ll just bake a little bit more.
Yes, but fresh spinach? Cooked & frozen spinach? Apart from that is a volumetric the altogether wrong choice.
If you cook a cup of spinach you gonna be left a single spinach leaf when it’s done lol. Spinach follows no rules.
Uses some American brand name you’ve never heard of as an ingredient with no further elaboration
Sprinkle on some Glorm to taste, or for you midsouthnortherners, pour in some Old Undeserving Chattal Slave Mamy’s for a similar effect
Mfw (I am in the Middle East and my understanding of American food is exclusively “<verging-on-parody tuple name> Whopper” (this is a 30 second explainer on how to boil a potato))
I didn’t learn to measure anything until I was 30. I just cooked by vibes. My girlfriend started getting really irritated that I would make something and she would never have it again. Something like it? Sure. But it? No. So I started actually learning how to cook and know how much was going in .
Cooking freehanded can work. Cooking is art. Baking, on the other hand, is science. Every ingredient must be measured precisely, or you’ll get seriously funny results. And often on the bad side of funny.
Once you figure out the science you can even freehand baking. Salt, flour, water yeast. Got a flour with more protein? Up the water and decrease the salt a little. Trying to make bread out of cake flour? Decrease the water a touch. Know what your target hydration level is for a bread type and you can pretty much wing the rest. Can’t do a double rise today? Do a slow rise in the fridge overnight. Want a slightly thicker crust? Add more salt. Baking has a lot of potential for freeform once you figure out the mechanics behind what goes into a recipe.
Yes, but you need to be quite advanced for that. This is bakers knowledge, not housewives/homecook knowledge.
I’ve seen recipes that are based around the water content (I.e. put X ml of water and add flour until shaggy) so your comment makes a lot of sense.
Hydration level comes first. Everything is built around that
You can also science cooking. Meat thermometers are absolutely fantastic.
Or, like I do, Sous Vide.
That’s the way I cook, just have made enough mistakes and so many different dishes I can put things together and make magic. On baking, my family doesn’t like fancy cakes, more like snacking cakes, those are pretty forgiving. I don’t measure rice & water, just know how it should look, and yes my husband sometimes gets annoyed that it’s not more standardized but I’m not a commercial chef I am a cook.
The exceptions - My sourdough bread, and the sourdough chocolate chip cookies - carefully measured by weight and if I am winging the bread (never the cookies) I try to still write down the measurements in case it’s the best bread I have ever made. The bread I could almost certainly make it without measuring at this point, I can tell by how it feels, what it will do, but have the scale and use it.
My mom cooked from recipes. Only from recipes . She asked her mom once how to make good biscuits, and her mom said “the water has to be very cold”. Which, honestly, would have helped me a lot. But my mom wanted a recipe!
I don’t measure rice & water
oh dude entire family agrees that i make the best rice in the family and i’ve tried to teach them how i make the rice but like it’s a big fucking argument how to make rice properly. at this point i think it’s just become a joke.
One scoop of rice. Rinsed a few times until the water is mostly clear. Throw it in the pot I always use for rice. Add water to the lower line that has developed over the years of making rice in the same pot. The upper line is from making mac and cheese so don’t use that one. Some salt. Maybe some oil or butter depending on the final dish. Place the lid on.
Bring to a boil, reduce to low. Wait until the lid harmonics change to tell you there isn’t any liquid water in there anymore. Use a fork to check the bottom of the pot for water. Done.
No one else here knows how to make rice. Everyone thinks a rice cooker would make my life easier. I had one. I tossed it because it kept scorching the rice.
once we got an electric pressure cooker it got a lot easier, but now i miss my rice pot that’s in a box somewhere in the garage.
I have five pressure canners/coolers. None electric. I don’t trust electronic devices designed to turn electricity into heat and be sold as cheap as possible to be a buy it for life item.
zojirushi Would probably be the only buy it for life rice cooker brand
i mean, neither did i. someone bought it for us. i feel like such a luddite sometimes. we mostly use it for rice and making budder, which it does a fantastic job at. we’ve had ours for 8 years which i had to look up and shocks me that it’s been working that well that long.
i keep wanting to make hummus, i just never do. it makes the smoothest hummus (we put the beans in for 45 minutes, no pre-soak), but you don’t exactly need it to be electric. you got the pressure canner already.
also the lemon curd is so easy. godsdammit i gotta make lemon curd with my budder i am so lazy
The crispy rice at the bottom of your pot is tahdig in Persian, tutong in Tagalog. In some cultures and families, they fight over the crispy rice, lol.
i can never get tahdig right, pressure cooker or stovetop. we used to have a kebab place around the corner that included it in their rice and i did everything i could to keep them in business. they closed march 2020 and left the country. good for them.
Yeah but it kinda messes up fried rice
You don’t use that part for the fried rice. You just eat it.
the lower line that has developed over the years of making rice in the same pot. The upper line is from making mac and cheese
Maybe you need to scrub your pots more thoroughly. If they’re stainless steel or something similar there shouldn’t be any permanent stains forming unless you don’t use enough elbow grease.
I’m curious, do you use the first line on your middle finger to measure water?
That’s how my grandmother taught us (pot and rice cooker).
i used to use my index finger, now i’m all about different ratios of water to rice depending on the grain because i’m fancy. we’ve got a 25 lb bag of jasmine we’re working through that i do 3water:2rice + 1T butter + 1/2 t salt.
Current project is good garlic rice, so i’ve been sauteing up some garlic butter (for 1 cup of rice, 10 cloves in 4T butter, then adding all the cloves and 1T of the garlic butter), but it’s not quite garlicky enough. I’m not sure whether i need more cloves or to make the butter more garlicky somehow.
You and my dad would get along great. He uses a whole bulb; his fried rice version has this toasted garlic flavor that’s just tasty.
My SIL adds Better Than Bouillon Roasted Garlic with her garlic rice (I dont remember if it’s a teaspoon or tablespoon).
Another version we learned was adding a combo of grated garlic and baked garlic; they both have different yet distinct flavors. That’s my aunt’s version and she uses chicken broth (Alton Brown’s recipe).
Lol on the fancy… good for you. You’re right though, different kinds of rice require different amounts of water. We already got that lecture from our grandparents a looooong time ago.
we went to the greek festival a couple weekends ago and came home with a whole quart of fresh toum. i’m about halfway through and the cats are about used to my new smell
The problem with that is that the size of the pot changes the volume of water with a linear finger measure.
Like for extremes if you had a test tube shaped pot with a foot of rice deep and only a finger depth of water is way different than a giant wide pot where grains area single layer and then a finger depth over top.
That’s why you use a rice cooker.
I don’t have one, I do a 2 to 1 ratio of water to rice. (For basmatti) Simmer on low, covered for 13 minutes, turn off heat ( leave covered ) for 30 minutes. Then fluff with fork. Perfect every time regardless of pot size.
We had to go through my great grandmothers hand written recipes and add measurements because of things like this, all the way back in the 90s it was an issue. A can of cherries was several ounces larger than it was then, and I guess even worse now.
She also liked to do a lot of “Add flour until it’s sticky” so we just added “Start with x amount of cups of flour then add more as needed”
Because of this I won’t buy any box mixes anymore - they were almost always overpriced for what you got and didn’t contain anything magical… They just made things simpler. I’ll make my cakes and cookies from scratch now and save a fortune.
This is the way.
Before this, I’d been complaining about frozen vegetables for a while now. I have several soup/casserole/savory-pie type recpies that all call for frozen vegetables by the pound (ex: Defrost 1lb. broccoli and 1lb. cauliflower). Now all the veg comes in 12oz bags instead of 16oz, and I don’t want to make 3/4 the food, I want the WHOLE recipe – and I don’t want a bunch of half-used bags in the freezer.
Messing with cake mixes is an even bigger problem for me. On the rare occasion I make a cake, it is either homemade carrot cake or from a box because I all my attempts to make a decent regular cake (chocolate, angel food, or whatever) have been too dry, too crumbly or otherwise inferior. I guess Betty Crocker just doesn’t want my money. S’alright. I like my carrot cake and its surely more healthy.
I’d look to see if there is a different veg I could add to fill out the quarter pound. Like maybe some raw carrots could be chopped and added to the cauliflower And if they’re cut to the right size they’ll cook them the same amount of time.
OR they could go back to standard portions that don’t require recipe fixes. The better solution is to use fresh veg, but frozen is a huge time saver. FWIW, the broc/cauliflower recipe continues and adding more carrots would overwhelm the carrot quantity. This is pretty close to mine, but I don’t use lemon juice and do use nutmeg: https://oukosher.org/recipes/layered-vegetable-kugel-pareve/
But then the product would cost more and people would immediately go to whatever other brand was available out of spite or budget consciousness.
Margarine? I didn’t know people still used that.
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The products already cost more, regardless, and they HAVE sent me to a different brand in a different store that didn’t change sizes. The other one costs more than the 12oz., but it less per pound (something like $1.59 for 12oz or $1.99 for 16oz. – you get the idea). Pre-COVID, these would regularly go on sale for $.99 a pound.
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For me it is oil and not margarine, just like the example says. You will find lots of kosher recipes do not use butter because you can’t eat dairy with meat – and even if you aren’t eating meat, you still need dairy from a kosher animal. Cheese can’t have animal rennet. There are lots of rules. Anyway, it is easier to skip butter for anything that might get eaten with meat.
I figured the no butter on my own. But I would take oil over margarine almost any day of the week.
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I hate beets as vegetables but shredded beets in chocolate cake will fix it just like the carrot fixes the spice cake.
I like roasted beets in a bubble and squeak with other toasted root veg.
so i’m trying to teach myself to cook empanadas right now and some of those leftover veg sound like some great filling
Great comment thread here! Just found this book…kind if a game-changer for me…
https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/Ratio/Michael-Ruhlman/Ruhlmans-Ratios/9781416571728
That’s on my wish list.
Thank you for sharing, was just thinking there needed to be some literature on simple cooking ratios. Looking forward to giving it a read
I can’t speak to that book specifically and am not sure what the translation of Australian moneys to Freedom Units is, but 40 bucks for THIS sounds kinda… I wouldn’t go so far as to say “scammy” but I would definitely imply it.
Yes, baking and the like is almost entirely ratios. But you still have to understand how many parts fat and liquid butter is versus shortening versus lard versus… Yes, understanding those ratios makes it much easier to be flexible and you start realizing just how similar so many recipes are (and what the actual contribution of a given developer is). But that is more in the sense that you learn how similar two bread recipes actaully are as you make both.
The best way to actually learn that is to actually just cook and read through the recipes and make tweaks as you go. The second best way is to find instructors/youtubers who understand this and convey it. Kenji is going through some stuff lately but his older videos are spectacular for “Two parts flour to one part water but also this is the texture you actually want because humidity is a thing”. But Brian Lagerstrom (and Ethan Chlebowski when he is focusing more on cooking and less on weird wellness guru’ing) have more than taken up the burden. And while it is a few tiers lower, Made With Lau is actually amazing for learning how to translate “older” recipes into actionable steps.
And if you JUST want the ratios? Just go to the library and grab a few of the foundational cookbooks for a given cuisine and look at the recipes. THOSE are the ratios and… they are generally going to be REALLY close
I don’t know if it’s scammy - hard to tell without reading it - but it does sound really incomplete. There are so many variations on fats, liquids, liquids that are fats like oils, different behaviors of fats, the role of proteins like eggs, leavening agents… Maybe the book covers more, but just basic ratios doesn’t seem very helpful.
Completely picking up what you’re putting down regarding the dollar value and if I’m being honest was probably going to find an alternative way to access rather than purchase. Our libraries offer pretty much every book as ebooks on loan and for informational non fiction works you can usually glean the majority of the content through a quick peruse in-store or online synopsis.
Personally I do little baking but have been the primary cook in our household for the past 8 or so years and have been noticing that my dishes have been improving a lot lately due to noticing some ratios (particularly in pasta dishes, carbonara especially) that seem to work really well with what the family likes. These are probably rather personal and the missus does also somewhat despise that I generally never make the same thing twice cause I’m always tweaking things depending on available ingredients & whatnot, basically cooking from experience and feel. So I also agree with what you’ve mentioned around learning from doing and bringing in the look, feel & smell components to aid that learning.
The smell of things has made a huge difference in my cooking as well once I started to pay attention to when I could smell that things were done (mostly bbq and baking) - nothing more disappointing then following a recipe to the letter and coming out with an over cooked lamb shoulder (just one somewhat recent experience).
Why this was interesting was because I’ve realized that having a few ratios/rule of thumbs that relate not just to ingredient ratios but also to cooking times and styles I can be way more flexible and adventurous in my cooking while maintaining mostly consistent flavours and (more importantly) a happy family.
Also realizing the importance of trusting that you know your own appliances/cooking environment best has been helpful lately. Going back to the lamb shoulder comment, the recipe asked for me to have the grill at medium heat or about 150’ Celsius for like an hour. For me to get my bbq up to 150’ took a lot (it’s a six burner, so lots of space) but I was determined to follow the recipe to the letter and instead what I did was I ruined the dish. Everything was telling me that it was too hot (dials were past mid way, fat flare ups, etc) but instead of trusting my instincts and adjusting to my conditions I just blindly followed the recipe.
So yeah, bit of a lengthy comment but love simple ratios like a 3:1 for a vinegarette and feel like I could definitely benefit from some more knowledge in that area to further bolster my cooking skills. I’ll check out a couple of the youtubers you mentioned and go from there, cheers
The best way to actually learn that is to actually just cook and read through the recipes and make tweaks as you go. The second best way is to find instructors/youtubers who understand this and convey it.
My favorite ice cream cookbook has like six recipes across 150 pages. It explains why those recipes work the way they do (milkfat percentages and cooking temperatures) and then it’s just variations on the recipes in different flavors. I’ve broken like seven ice cream machines getting it right and it’s been worth it.
25 Pages per recipe
That’s a lot of ingredients. How much does it cost to make a quart?
a year
This explains everything.
I made some things from hand me down recipes recently that I had memorized and they seemed a bit off. So I dug up the recipes (a can of this and a container of that) and assumed that I was going insane.
These c°ck$uck!ng m0th3rf^ck€r$… Grrr!
Okay but some of my favorite people in life have been cock suckers. Which is why I hate it as a pejorative.
Everyone I know has an asshole, yet here we are…
On the flip side you get goofy things like this where you are supposed to use a specific amount of something that so far as I know you would have to buy as a pre-made mix. Either that or start a separate recipe to make you own cake mix.
White cake mix is easy though:
2¾ cups cake flour
1½ cups granulated sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon fine salt, sea salt or himalayan
4 tablespoons softened unsalted butterIn a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
Then use a pastry blender to cut the butter into the dry ingredients. Blend until the butter is not longer detectable and the mix is a fine crumb.
Store in an airtight container and refrigerate until ready to use.
Alternately, skip the butter step until just before use. No need to refrigerate then.
Yeah, which is the real way to go. Sub-recipies end up screwing up my flows at times, ‘self-rising’ flour is another thing that I don’t keep around premade and have to stop and make separate.
Stuff like that is available to buy at places like bulk barn. You can buy by weight or volume there.
Never heard of the place around here, but I like the thought. Buying things for odd amounts like to top up a spice jar without having a separate large container.
They carry a huge variety too.
Yeah, that’s not a recipe I’m ever using.
HAHAHA that recipe is half a dump cake.
Hadn’t heard the term before but it does look like it.
I know of a dump cake as a thing to do on a family camping trip. Canned fruit, cake mix, butter and I think some other ingredient are simply dumped into a baking dish or dutch oven, resulting in a cobbler-like substance which 10 year olds will love. Here we’re making half of one in an instant pot, because everything had to be done in an instant pot. I remember seeing a recipe for making wine in an instant pot. YOU DON’T APPLY HEAT OR PRESSURE TO GRAPE JUICE TO MAKE WINE!
It would be better if other recipes adjusted accordingly.
The Zatarans Jambalaya box still says to add a pound of smoked sausage. But those sausages went down to 14oz. Then 12oz. Now some are 10oz. The box still says to add a pound. It’s becoming a hotdog/bun situation.
Now I want to re-watch Father of the Bride.
I haven’t made Zatarans Jambalaya in years but I remember having this exact problem. I would have to use like 1 1/3 packages of sausage and end up with 2/3 of a sausage leftover
Who the fuck is buying those boxes if they still need things like eggs adding?
It’s just pre-measured flour, baking soda and sugar. You can do that in under a minute. Shit, the stuff is in the same aisle.
Betty Crocker does shrinkflation and you go after the consumer. Way to blame the victim there.
Do you have, in your cupboards, the ingredients to make a German chocolate cake, a pecan cake, and a carrot cake? No? Why not? Swap any of of those for a spice cake, or angel food, or gingerbread… You can’t??? Why not? A trip to the store and have exactly what I need to make any or all of those. I don’t have to pay for extra ingredients that are just going to sit, take up space, and go bad. Do you know how much it would cost to buy all the unique ingredients to make any of those cakes? And you used to get a reliable result too for look, taste, quantity, and quality. But with shrinkflation, that’s gone out the door.
Also, ignoring the fact, so many recipes start with a box from Betty Crocker, and then using something they do regularly have at home and use, they add their own little twist on it. Or just use one of those boxes as a base because not everyone has that stuff sitting around or even has the space to store it.
Lastly, flour is one of the most dangerous ingredients to have just sit around in terms of food safety.
But yeah, shame the customer…
Seems like you took that pretty personally 😂
It’s brain dead easy cooking and people that do it were probably taught by their parents to.
Restaurants do it all the time. Imagine the cake you really like at that one place. Now imagine that it’s literally just Betty Crocker.
I learned this first hand at my very first job at 16 and I’ve never looked at fast food the same way since. The fast food in question is a well-known regional chain, as large McDonald’s. Places like McDonald’s have their own dedicated supply chain.
The reason for having to add an egg, milk, or some other simple ingredient is because the mix companies found out people were more willing to adopt these mixes if there was a step where they had to do something beyond just adding water. Or at least this is what they told me on the Jiffy Mix factory tour as a child.
They didn’t do a study or anything. There was a prevailing theory at the time those mixes were first created that women have an inherent desire to do cooking stuff and since they figured women would be the main ones shopping for food items, they had to add more cooking actions to trick them into buying their products.
Frozen dinners have similar ploys by adding unnecessary stirring steps to the microwave directions.
Boxed baking mixes sell better if they still require eggs to be added. Makes people feel like they’re actually baking, as opposed to the just-add-water stuff
Guess everyone learns this at some point. I just skip any recipe that doesn’t give me volume or weight for everything. Otherwise, the chance of messing up the recipe is too high.
So many family recipes are documented this way, though, so it’s a significant problem when these are handed down.
“I just skip grandma’s chili because she didn’t record it using volume or weight for everything” isn’t a thing people say or do.
You see, this is resolved by having no family recipes handed down to you. Like myself.
I have zero recipes handed down. But a while back I made an effort to remember every standard meal my mom made in the 70s and 80s and re-create them. If I had a question on some detail I’d ask her.
So nothing handed down on paper but I did get all the information.
That doesn’t really help when you need X amount of something and everything is sold in Y amounts.
While some ingredients this isn’t an issue, I’ve run into this for pasta sauce/paste, coconut milk, canned beans, etc. which are hard to work around.
I work around it fairly often. It can be inconvenient for sure. I think I end up avoiding those types of recipes if I’m not going to be cooking with those ingredients often enough. But for ones that I do, coconut curries funnily enough, I just deal with having some in my fridge at pretty much all times.
Other times I substitute the canned/frozen version for fresh since you can buy the right amount.
You must do some high stakes cooking. I always tweak recipes, sometimes even if I’ve never made it before.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter much, sometimes it does. There are probably some recipes I’d give a go. But really, it doesn’t actually come up all that often. I think a lot of people have converted cans in old recipes to actual measurements before posting online.
My family doesn’t really have any recipes they passed down. Pretty sure they did everything by feel.
There are thousands of recipes sites on the internet with dead simple recipes, especially for cookies. Baking from scratch has never been easier to do.
Also the good recipes tell you the weight of the can, if using cans (almost always seems to be things like whole peeled tomatoes or chipotle chilies in adobo)
This just reminds me of recipes that are like “how to make homemade soft pretzel. step 1, buy pretzel dough”. I get that some boxed mixes are just pre measured ingredients, so why not learn the ratios and make them yourself?
But pretzles are harder than average because you need to boil them in a lye solution and who has lye hanging around these days? Bagels are only slightly easier because their boil doesn’t require lye.
I made soft sourdough pretzels this week with just baking soda and brown sugar and they turned out great!
Cool! Not traditional, but it’s an alaklai so I’m sure it’s a more practical way than hunting down lye at the grocery store.
“I didn’t have pretzel dough so instead I used pizza dough, and instead of salt I used mozzarella cheese. Delicious recipe!”
…
Now I want pretzza.
“we can’t have pancakes because I didn’t buy any mix” “What? Mix? You know you can just make that stuff on your own. Right?”
We have reached a point where, despite celebrity chefs existing, some people have zero idea that you can make stuff without a can of this, a block of cream cheese, a box of that and a bottle of this. They don’t know the first thing about cooking. To them pretzels are something you buy from someone else and sometimes you have to bake them yourself.
I was making a galette for the first time and while I was going over the epic saga that is making your own puff pastry I said, “fuck it, I’ll just buy some from the freezer section at the store”. It came out great and I saved 3 hours of my life.
Phyllo dough and puff pastry are things I will totally cheat on. And if I’m turning leftovers and my frequent surplus of eggs into quiche I will cheat with a frozen pie crust. Even Alton Brown says that last one is allowed.
Same only with Pasteis De Nata:
https://www.biggreenegg.eu/en/inspiration/recipes/pasteis-de-nata
My problem: There are different puff pastries out there and so I made the recipe THREE TIMES to figure out the best one to use.
Spoiler - The most expensive one.
Dufour.
https://dufourpastrykitchens.com/puff-pastry-dough/
Here’s the difference:
“first enclosing a “butter block” in the dough”
Compared with:
https://www.pepperidgefarm.com/product/puff-pastry-sheets/
“VEGETABLE OILS (PALM, SOYBEAN, HYDROGENATED COTTONSEED)”
Store brand is the same.
None of them were AWFUL, just the Dufour is head and shoulders above the others, and 4x the price.
Hah! I used Dufour also. My choices were that and Pepperidge Farm but I knew the critical part was it had to use real butter. Looking at the prices I knew that PF being half the price meant that they had to make some serious compromises. If I’m going to eat a bunch of calories I’m going to do it right.
Where do galette (buck wheat savory pancakes from Britanny) and puff pastry come together? Or is that just another Amerikan kitchen misnomer like “pepperoni” or “bologna”?
The buckwheat panake is specifically a Breton galette. Compare with the galette des rois which does use puff pastry. But you’re too high on your own “America bad” farts to consider that words are used in more than one way.
Then why do you call it just galette instead of galette des rois?
Why did you call it just a galette instead of galette bretonne?
(Because I can use context to figure out which definition is being used instead of jumping straight to gatekeeping)
The website joyofbaking.com defines the term galette as “a French term signifying a flat round cake that can be either sweet or savory and while [recipes can use] puff pastry as a base, they can also be made from risen doughs like brioche, or with a sweet pastry crust.”
If you order a Galette in France, you definitely get the savory version.
Ha, my kids thought this until just a couple years ago, as they approached college age. I did always use a mix for convenience, so they were hella surprised when I made it “from scratch “
For me, it’s not just the convenience of having the dry ingredients already proportioned to save me a little time, but that I don’t consistently have the basic ingredients. It’s easier to buy a box of pancake mix, than flour plus baking soda plus whatever else is in there
For me the missing ingredient is always milk. But we have heavy cream for coffee so I can dilute that down. I’m starting to keep a pint bottle of ultra pasteurized milk in the fridge for occasions when I need milk. As long as those are sealed they keep for a very long time.
I get the shelf-stable boxes of milk from the baking aisle. They’re smaller and last longer, and so much more convenient than buying fresh if you don’t use it all the time. I’ve always got milk on hand without worrying about it going bad.
We don’t have those. I wish we did.
Cream cheese? Does that belong in that list?
Have you seen people adding it to every Mexican or Italian slow cooker recipe?
I haven’t, no. I don’t use a slow cooker that much, and when I do, it’s with my own recipes. I assumed you were referring to baking from pre-mixes.
I’m thinking of all those cooking videos that you find on Facebook where people dump a bunch of stuff from bags and boxes and a brick of cream cheese into a slow cooker and call it cooking.
Oh, fair. I don’t have Facebook.
I’ve shared my grandmothers recipe before, worth sharing again. Caution: Makes a metric fuckton of pancakes. Make for multiple people. You cannot eat this many pancakes.
1 Qt. Buttermilk
2 TBS Baking Soda
1 TBS Salt
4 Cups Flour
2 TBS Baking Powder
1 Pkg Dry Yeast
1/4 C. Oil
6 Eggs
1 cup of milk the next morning.Put 1 quart buttermilk in large bowl and add 2 TBS Baking SODA and 1 TBS Salt.
Mix 4 cups of flour with 2 TBS Baking POWDER, stir this mixture into the buttermilk.
Don’t mix up the SODA with the POWDER. You might not think it will make a difference, it does.
Add one package of dry yeast, 1/4 cup oil. Mix.
Whip 6 eggs till foamy, fold in mixture. Do not use electric mixer, use mixer tine by hand.
Pour batter into large pitcher or bowl. Cover with foil. Refrigerate overnight.
The next morning put a cup of milk in the pitcher to thin the batter.
Heat pan until hot. Add 3 TBS or so of oil, when water droplets sizzle in the pan it’s ready.
Cook pancakes in 2s or 3s. When the tops are covered in steam-holes then it’s ready to flip. 2 to 3 minutes or so. Can be as fast as 1 minute. Do not turn your back or they will burn.
Lasts 10 days to 2 weeks in fridge. Yeast will turn black over time, this is normal. Stir batter before use.
TY, i was about to post my recipe. Beat me to it.
I’ll add though, we usually just pop everything in the blender, give it a quick pulse and we’re good. We don’t let ours raise overnight. We’re not that fancy and we like our batter runny. Thin, silver-dollar pancakes.
If we’re doing an event, we find it helpful to keep an old hersheys chocolate syrup bottle, clean it very thoroughly, and use that as a batter dispenser.
This is crazy, this is why I use a mix. Instead of having to buy all these ingredients, especially buttermilk that goes bad quickly. I can just buy a box and keep it on my shelf for months
A contributing factor of mixes is that many of us just don’t bake much anymore, don’t have regular use for the basic ingredients. Sure the basic ingrate cheaper but I don’t have any other uses for them
The benefit of a mix is “I want pancakes now.” Grammas recipe needs 1 day of planning.
Baking powder and yeast. They weren’t taking any chances. Did she work in a kitchen of lumberjacks?
You haven’t met my family. 😀
The hard part is letting the batter sit overnight that first night!
I know for cake mixes, at least, they add some chemicals that improve the texture and moisture retention of the cake. It’s stuff you’d never find in the baking isle, but it improves the resulting cake so much that many professional cake bakers just use the box mix. They have access to the same food suppliers and would just end up duplicating the work of giant conglomerates research.
This makes me wonder if a quarter cup of butter was ever less than half of a whole stick… 🤔
That’s an American thing. In most of the world butter comes in ~half pound units. So half a stick would be half a cup. Except Australia which 500 gram blocks. America has been 1/4 pound units since 1800s but didn’t move to the stick shape until the 1950s.
In Germany it’s 250g, which is way off 226.80g if you’re doing something as precise as baking can be.
i can assure you most of the world does not measure butter in pounds, we have 500g blocks here in sweden as well and i’d expect that to be the european standard at least.
The ~ was to indicate that it’s not actually that amount but close to that amount and the difference being the rounding error between metric and imperial
