Cooking

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.

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 😅

using measurements like 'a can' is just a bad idea anyways..

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"

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. ;)

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.

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.

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