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
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)
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…
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
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.
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.
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…
Its kinda weird to read she was dissappointed because the recipe was “passed down” by her mother. If its a box mix you add like eggs and water to how much ‘recipe’ is there to pass down? Its not quite the same as a full recipe that uses a certain brand spice mix for a base or something, the box is the recipe.
This isn’t about the instructions on the box. There are other recipes that make use of box mixes as base ingredients.
Yeah, this is ridiculous. Is measuring things out in grams and mixing the ingredients too complicated? Americans rely too much on corporate ultra-processed food and then get angry when they get shafted.
To this point, you can make cake mix. It’s flour, sugar, leavening agents or yeast / baking powder, salt, and anti-clumping agents / preservatives.
Just take 10 minutes and mix that shit together yourself and leave out the preservatives. You’ll get a better cake and recipe worth passing down.
I blame processed food manufacturers for turning cookbooks from instruction manuals into marketing vehicles. A recipe that requires 2 eggs, 450g of flour and Uncle Whizbang’s Special Baking Powder™ is an ad, and not a recipe.
For this reason I’ve started collecting vintage cookbooks that are actual culinary manuals, and not advertising that you pay for.
I get what you are saying, because a lot of those recipes were magazine ads or from the package themselves, but name brand does sometimes help.
Trying to make some recipes from the UK in North America was a challenge, because self rising flour brand Y is different than self rising flour brand X.
And if you counter with “just make your own self rising flour” Then you have to check is it Canadian Flour or American Flour, because the Canadian Flour has much higher protein and absorbs more water. And the rising agents vary.
But those “recipes” fall apart if the brand changes internal ingredients.
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.
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
I’m all for using box mixes like this to make something easier if you wanna bake shit… but this seems a bit odd…
“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays. She now calls them “unusable.” She could buy an additional box to make up the difference, she acknowledges, “but out of principle, I just can’t.”
It was a box mix… does that really need passing down? It looks like she sub’d oil for butter and thats it. I’m sure the box suggests a little less butter now… so like, a little less oil? I can’t imagine the box mix cookies are just plain trash now either, unless they just are.
There are a lot of recipes out there that use boxed cake mixes off-label. Like I saw Dylan Hollis make something that involved one can of pumpkin puree and one box of spice cake mix. There are a lot of things like that which are going to break if package sizes change.
They may not be authentic homemade gourmet organic quarter sawn BPA free low sulfur fair trade influencer grade but there’s a lot of people who are nostalgic for recipes like that because it’s what mama made in the 80’s, and we used to sit around that godawful yellow table with that one chair that had a gash in the back, you remember that? And she’d put that icing on it, that cream cheese icing.
The image I hate most is someone trying to do the old thing of one box of this, one can of that, the batter’s not how they remember but whatever, bake…doesn’t come out right, over bake…what’s going on? And now we’re wasting food because “a box of cake mix” isn’t what it used to be. All because we suffer a few billionaires to live.
My point is, all she did was change butter for oil. She didn’t do anything special or fancy like your suggesting.
They use the box as a base ingredient.
I doubt the recipe is “Use the box as instructed”
All judith needs to do is mix up her own cake mix.
When you look at some of the cookie mixes today from them, its use the box, 1/3 cup of butter (or whatever it is, already forgotten the exact amount), and 2 eggs.
Their family recipe in the article was use the box, 2 eggs and a 1/3 cup of oil.
You have a different quantity of leavening relative to ypur fats due to the size change. The whole thing will be goopy until you sort out the baking soda/powder which can get difficult since you use so little relative to the volume of the batch.
Sometimes it’s easy to be sentimental and nostalgic over trash food. It’s why I love Taco Bell. Especially right now because the 7 Layer and chili Cheese burritos are both back temporarily.
Sound like peak 50/60 style cooking
Cmon man, there’s two kinds of recipes: one with exact measurements and precise instructions, usually written in metric with a lot of notes and contingencies… and then there’s general guideline cheat sheets and refreshers, which you use when you already know how to cook it.
If a recipe tells me “a couple spoonsful” and I don’t know what to do, the problem is not the recipe, it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing.
So what do you do? you learn. or I guess you could be like NileRed and watch food burn in front of your face because you don’t want to deviate from the recipe. over and over again. but hopefully you’ll learn to deviate soon.
You are confusing baking with cooking.
Baking is much closer to a science than cooking. It is all about precise measurements, and you have to be a very good baker to “wing it” and end up with a consistently good end product.
American here. I always sucked at baking until I discovered a UK site using the metric master race measurements.
It was all in grams instead of tablespoons/ounces/cups.
Suddenly my shit was perfect…
baking by volume is INSANE why would anyone do that?!
i remember as a kid my nan telling me to not pack the flour too tightly in the cups or the measurement will be off. like why not just weigh the flour?!
I often have issues explaining to literally everyone that oz and fl oz are not the same… Only true match is water which is what it was created for.
8oz is weight.
8 fl oz is volume…So a cup of flour is a volume measurement of something that should be measured by weight.
I bought a food scale and gram everything now.
I have two scales in the kitchen. One regular digital food scale I use all the time. One that’s better suited for measuring cocaine that I bought when I was needing a lot more precision to brew one gallon batches of beer.
I use my food scale for brewing espresso.
I understand needing the miligram scale for yeast doing microbrew. My family already calls me a scientist for espresso. That scale would be funny in my kitchen.
Most recipes will use the volume measurement since everyone has measuring cups and almost no one has a food scale. Flour is close enough to a fluid anyway.
You still have issues with packed vs unpacked and leveled spoons with flour/baking soda/baking powder. Grams are just more precise.
I have a pancake recipe in grams.
There are recipes based on package sizes which is fine for chocolate chips or nuts but becomes intensely problematic when it is leavening ingredients. Half-a box of bisquick was a valid measure when there was one size on the shelf.
Some of my family recipes go back 150-250 years so along the way some of the collection contains cards calling for a tin of x, y, or z. I still sometimes use a ham glaze that calls for a bottle of coca cola.
Oh, man, “bottle of Coca-Cola”. When I was a kid, that meant a 16 ounce glass bottle, but prior to that it could have been 8 ounces, 10 ounces. Now it could be 1, 2, or even 3 liters.
Do they still sell 3 liters? I haven’t seen one in ages.
I see them mostly at import shops.
If it says a couple spoonfuls then you are golden to abandon all fear and just go with it. That’s half my curry recipes. How much curry do you want? How much can you handle?
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 😅
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))
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”.
If you cook a cup of spinach you gonna be left a single spinach leaf when it’s done lol. Spinach follows no rules.
Is a cup not equivalent to 250ml?
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
You can also science cooking. Meat thermometers are absolutely fantastic.
Or, like I do, Sous Vide.
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
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”
using measurements like ‘a can’ is just a bad idea anyways…
Yeah but a can is basically one unit. Once a can is opened it usually has to be used relatively quickly, so I would much rather use an entire can than measure out a fractional number of cans to be precise with measurements. It depends on the ingredient of course but eg with beans it really doesn’t matter to get the exact weight.
Which is why a lot of recipes will say “One 14 oz can of…”
But they didn’t start saying that until 2008.
as they should
While this is true, Betty Crocker is shooting themselves in the foot with this.
Back in the day having a recipe for a specific box made cooking easier and locked people into one brand of ingredients.
This move is undoing a lot of the marketing they did back in the 40s and 50s
Yeah they’re really burning that 1940s marketing asset
It’s American by nature.
“It’s 1950 and a can is a can is a can, everyone knows how big a can is. And it will never change!”
No.
You need to think in a Truman-Eisenhower can, a Reagan can, a Bush can and an Obama can just as you do about dollars for pretty much every year on record.
Now, I wonder: How many 1979 dollars in a 1990 box of Kellogs?
Oooh, that’s what Obama meant by “yes we can”
I had a chicken casserole recipe and it called for “a can of cream of chicken soup”. Ok, this soup comes in the normal, single serving size and the jumbo “cooking for a family” size. It made the recipe unusable.
anything that calls for a can of cream of chicken soup was going to end up the same way regardless.
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
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
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
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.
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
That’s on my wish list.
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.
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.
so i’m trying to teach myself to cook empanadas right now and some of those leftover veg sound like some great filling
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
