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> “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, C
by mh- 1y ago
> “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.
> a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil
I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse.
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583536/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583536/
- Avshalom 1y agoI can't find the article about it just this second but that's actually really common. Greenbean casserole was invented by a Campbell's copywriter.
- neilv 1y agoI've had the tiniest nagging confusion about that... From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different. My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, family reunions, cafes, ad photos, etc.)
- beloch 1y agoCookies are surprisingly sensitive to slightly different ingredients or practices. e.g. Using different brands of butter, different sizes of eggs, or storing the dough at different temperatures can have a large impact on the final product, even though the same recipe was followed.
- MangoToupe 1y agoBaking in general is very sensitive. I've made batches of cookies that I've tried to reproduce for years but, because I didn't take notes, could not. Hell even the altitude you bake at requires significant adjustment.
- cheschire 1y agoCooking is art. Baking is science.
- sniffers 1y agoThey are both art and both science.
- tayo42 1y agoThe baking is a science meme needs to die. When your baking you need to learn to react to the dough that's in front of you.
- sniffers 1y agoAs someone who was a professional baker for years, agree. Baking very much has intuition and art like qualities. It's just less forgiving of loose measurements until you know what you are doing.
- account42 1y agoIt's less for giving but not as unforgiving as some people make it out to be. Even less so when you don't demand commercial level consistent results that can be sold fungible products.
- bluGill 1y agoThough people have been baking in poor conditions for a long time. If peasants could bake bread without even a cast iron dutch oven maybe you can. Sure each batch is different but it works.
- ceejayoz 1y agoVolume-based measurements, too. One person's "half a cup" is not another's. I've been much happier since I started weighing everything.
- wink 1y agoGetting a new oven has invalidated every single time written down in a recipe here. (usually not too hard to adjust, but still)
- account42 1y agoThat's why you measure result wherever possibly - poke the cake with a toothpick and see how much sticks to it, measure internal temperature for large meats, bake until the outside reaches the desired appearance, etc.
- jhawk28 1y agoTwo main mistakes that people make: 1. "scoop and dump" approach to flour. Flour should be spooned into the measuring cup so its not packed in. 2. over-baking cookies due to cooking too long or oven that is too hot or not hot enough.
- karlshea 1y agoFlour should be weighed.
- Dilettante_ 1y agoThe flour should not be packed? I've always done it like that, it seemed so obvious that that would give a less random result that having it loose. I guess I'll weigh it and check against the markings on my measuring cup next time.
- shermantanktop 1y agoWeighing is the only weigh.
- ip26 1y agoSome pack, some sift and scoop. You have to know what the recipe wants. Weigh is in my opinion superior, it just wasn’t widely accessible before cheap digital scales.
- ksenzee 1y agoIn my four decades of baking, I have never seen a recipe that calls for packing flour. It is always sifted, spooned and leveled, or weighed.
- jtc331 1y agoBrown sugar should be packed; flour must not be — you’ll get substantially more mass per volume than the recipes assume.
- bluGill 1y agofour is alway sifted - to get the mouse droppings out. In our modern world nobody has mouse droppings in flour but tradition is still strong. Weighing doesn't care but if you are scouping as much air as possible is what the recipe assumes.
- Thegn 1y agoI can speak to this - the main variations are in the kind of butter you use. Using salted, unsalted, or margarine result in similar yet different cookies. I personally use unsalted and feel like it creates the most “cookie” like experience. Flour brand and texture also makes a difference. You will get a very different result based on using the store brand vs (for example) King Arthur flour.
- Avshalom 1y agoWell I mean weight vs volume, actual oven temp, full fat vs skim, salted or unsalted. There's a lot of little variables even "following" a recipe.
- cjensen 1y agoThe tollhouse recipe is amazingly fragile. Slight variations in temperature can make the cookies "go flat" or end up with a thick skin. No surprise there is a variation of outcomes using older ovens that were very imprecise.
- Balgair 1y agoI mean, also, when was the last time you had your oven properly calibrated? How sure are you that it's actually 350 F?
- derefr 1y agoIIRC this would mostly be temperature offset + ease of oven temperature swings in response to introduction of thermal mass; plus humidity and altitude (= air pressure.) (If you want to learn about reproducibility, look up what the factories making the packaged-snack version of your food tend to control for!)
- whyenot 1y agoEven if you use exactly the same ingredients, there is the temperature of the butter and how good a job you do of creaming it. Then there are factors like how do you mix the ingredients, and for how long. These all affect the final product. Then there is the oven, and if the temperature is accurate, if it does a good job holding temperature, etc. That's a lot of variables for something as simple as a tollhouse cookie!
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoWhy are you using chocolate chips? Real bakers get the cacao pods from the grocery store, ferment the nibs inside for a month, then carefully formulate their own chocolate to pour into boutique chips of their own making. As other comments point out, there is no added value in the pre-made ones, make your own chips! Oh, and the mixing bowl, why not take up glass-blowing? It's relatively easy to make your own bowls.
- kbelder 1y agoMy brother set out to copy out mother's pie dough recipe, so had her do it in front of him. He recorded every measurement, each step of the creation process, but it didn't work. The result was a perfectly serviceable pie crust, but noticeably inferior to our mom's. Maybe the humidity in the kitchen, or subtle changes in rolling style... mom could do it every time and we couldn't copy it. The truth is, we were trying to short cut past the effort involved of mastery by making hundreds of pies over decades...
- beloch 1y agoIf the origin of these recipes was indeed Betty Crocker's own marketing department, undoing a very successful bit of advertising in this manner would be hilariously dumb. In any case, it typically pays to carefully observe how people use your products before you change them.
- gwd 1y agoSpeaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird -- using a pre-made mix as a base for a recipe that it's not designed for. That recipe looks like it just has flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt pre-mixed (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need). People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper.
- mh- 1y agoI think people know you can purchase baking ingredients. There are both familiarity (consistency) and convenience aspects here.
- rjh29 1y agoIf you're only making cakes occasionally it's a pain to buy all the ingredients and have them sit around. Besides, even professional bakers use premix.
- rimprobablyly 1y agoOh no they don't.
- ericpauley 1y agoOh yes they do: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec (Also linked above)
- llbbdd 1y agoThe confidence. Why wouldn't they? The nobility inherent in suffering more labor to make a worse final product?
- bigstrat2003 1y agoYou put in barely more labor to get a better final product, because cakes (and brownies, etc) made from boxed mixes never turn out as well as those from scratch.
- gus_massa 1y agoThe main problem here is that eggs are discrete, and you can't reduce a 30% when you use 2 eggs. (Actualy eggs are classified by size, but nobody is going to search for the exact shrinked egg.) Also, even a perfect escaled recipe will have different cooking time and temperature.
- userbinator 1y agoEggs can be considered continuous with a large enough volume of them.
- dmoy 1y agoAlso you totally can reduce an egg by 30%, it's just a pain in the ass. 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.
- dtgriscom 1y agoWhy separate, split, and then combine? Why not combine and then split?
- saltcured 1y agoI am guessing: unless you blast them in a blender, the beaten mix isn't really uniform and you may end up extracting more egg white or more yolk than intended when you remove some of this lumpy content.
- dmoy 1y ago^ yea pretty much this I'm not 100% sure but whenever I've tried to reduce an egg without splitting first, it always ends up with a super wrong amount of yolk I could also just be bad at it, idk