10 ms·

What I hate most about shrinkflation is how shady it is. That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie makes me feel like I'

What I hate most about shrinkflation is how shady it is. That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie makes me feel like I'm being played for a fool, and I do not like that. With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.

moolcool 1y ago
> With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is Ehh, there’s nothing wrong with a recipe containing a shortcut if it works, and standardizing on “a box of cake mix” as a measurement makes sense, because who wants to have 1/10th of a box of cake mix in their cupboard?
- bruce511 1y ago
  Same people who have flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, milk ‐ pasta, rice, potatoes, ya know, food. I don't eat a whole bag of rice with every meal. I have a plastic tub. Buy rice, fill tub, remove potions as required, repeat. My pantry is full of plastic tubs with various staples. My veggies come in bunches. My eggs in boxes. When did we become so helpless that "the box is the wrong size" became an issue?
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    Because we use those ingredients constantly and regularly. You don't usually make a particular type of cookie every week or two. You might only make it once every six months. And your cake mix won't stay good exposed to oxygen for six months. It's not about being helpless, c'mon.
    - bruce511 1y ago
      I think you and I have very different ideas of "helpless". :) "Oh no, the premix is a different size, no more cookies ever" - seems like a pretty helpless response to me. First World Problems I guess...
      - crazygringo 1y ago
        I think you're being extremely judgmental and making a lot of assumptions. I didn't see any "helpless" in the article. I see someone who doesn't want to spend twice the money for no good reason, and then have leftover ingredients they don't have any other use for. It's sad that you seem unable to sympathize with someone else's inconvenience and chose to diminish them instead. When standard ingredient sizes change, that have remained unchanged for decades, and lots of recipes are scaled to match them precisely, you... choose to call people helpless, rather than call it out as corporate greed? It's actually constructive, not "helpless", to stop buying the product, because if enough people do that, the company gets the message and brings back the old size.
      - brian-armstrong 1y ago
        It's time to log off lil bro
    - dml2135 1y ago
      Well this is why it makes sense to bake from standard ingredients like flour that have many different uses, instead of a processed box that can only be used to make one thing.
      - zdragnar 1y ago
        Eh? We eat almost no flour on a daily basis. We might eat cake every few months. "Standard" is not standard at all.
        dml2135 1y ago
        If you only bake cakes I guess it makes sense — but you can make many other baked goods with flour.
        bruce511 1y ago
        Yeah, "Standard" will vary a lot from one place to another. For what it's worth, flour is used almost daily here. (We keep several kinds to hand.) We make pizza (ie make the dough) at least once a week. Bread on occasion. Batters for fried fish. As a thickener in sauces and gravys. For making fresh pasta, and so on. All this of course is very cultural. We cook at home. If we eat out once a month it's a lot. We don't get take-aways or fast food. Because (frankly) they're just not that good. So yes, our "standard" leans towards a well-stocked, varied, pantry. And I completely get that this is weird by US standards (although common outside the US).
      - dghlsakjg 1y ago
        Standard flour? Which standard? There are a lot of different kinds of flour. At most well stocked grocers in North America you will find pastry flour, all purpose flour, bread flour, organic flour, self rising flour, etc. That’s just the white wheat flour that you could use to make a cake. Don’t forget that whole wheat and different varietals of wheat exist. If you make cake with bread flour it is going to be very different from one made with pastry flour. There is no such thing as “standard flour”. Hell, even the mill that you use to grind the wheat berry can drastically change the nature of your flour. That’s the whole point of this article. That what you think of as a standard might not be a standard forever, or it might not be a standard at all.
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    When recipes that we use called for a box of something. You seem argumentative about this, but it's easy to understand.
  - sniffers 1y ago
    I don't know that it's helplessness, I think it's genuinely difficult to notice when a product shrinks in size by an ounce or two and when a chemical composition changes. You probably make one batch, it fails, and now you have to research the size of the previous box and the size of the new box and do a bit of math. It's doable, but also, that's hoping the cake mix hasn't changed chemically. Research and math and experimentation is not zero effort.
  - kop316 1y ago
    Assuming you read the article, they address that: "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.'" As someone who likes to cook, I understand this appeal too. I rarely make brownies (one or twice a year), but when I do, I just go to the boxed stuff. It reminds me of my childhood when I made them with my parents and siblings. I could reverse engineer the recipe to mimic what it does (and probably improve it), but given how little I make them, so it isn't high on my list of things to do. Now if they changed the recipe, sure, that may make me motivated enough to reverse engineer the recipe, but I would still be disappointed. I think that's what they are going through. Sure, they could figure out what "1 box" used to be, they could go through the effort of reconstructing it with only from scratch ingredients, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's disappointing to have to go through. Maybe this recipe is one they always made for their kids and now grand-kids.
    - bruce511 1y ago
      I get the nostalgic aspect. But it's not like there aren't a zillion from-scratch brownie recipes to choose from. And since you're doing it twice a year, honestly, get 2 boxes. If throwing away some extra premix destroys the pleasure, then that's a low bar. Would I reverse-engineer the box? No. That sounds like work. But its not hard to find recipes online. Of course with every problem comes opportunity. What I see here is an opportunity for a devoted grandson to box up 18oz of premix for grandma. Grandma's "secret" was that she "cheated", her pleasure was in the feeding not the baking. Enabling grandma to continue this going forward is the easiest thing ever.
      - citizenkeen 1y ago
        “It’s not a problem for me so I struggle to see why it’s a problem for anybody else”. The lack of empathy throughout your comments here is staggering. I’m a fantastic baker. I can bake a much better cake than my grandma ever could, but I can’t bake the cake I had in my childhood without a box. “Just but two” is nonsense dumb advice.
        1y ago
  - moolcool 1y ago
    Some products are packaged so that one box constitutes one unit, and when they change that units size out of corporate stinginess, it’s inconvenient. It’s very cool that you use fresh bulk ingredients for everything, so this article isn’t about you.
    - account42 1y ago
      The point is that is a self-induced problem or at least one that you can avoid if you take care to not become reliant on some corporation for your "family" recipe.
      - moolcool 1y ago
        You're already reliant on corporations for your family recipes. People ITT are so quick to get all Richard Stallman on their grandmothers for having the gall to use a pre-measured can of Cream of Mushroom soup in their casserole recipe.
        account42 1y ago
        Yes, we're commenting on an article that would have proven Food Stallman right. Relying on processed flour and similar staples is hardly the same as relying on a specific unique cake mix.
jaggederest 1y ago
> feels like something pretty straight forward to fix. It is actually not. This is something I learned as a lad working in a bakery, professional bakers use all kinds of ingredients not readily available at home. Especially in e.g. boxed cake mix, it's actually a half dozen ingredients that are totally impractical to keep on hand. Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set. The annoying thing is, the ingredient list says "modified food starch", but it could be any of a half a dozen different kinds of modified food starch, with different properties depending on how it's been modified and what the composition of the original starch was. Some are gelling, some are thickening, some are thinning, etc. That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.
- bruce511 1y ago
  >> Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set. Um. Ok. You say this like it's a good thing? I'll be honest, your statement makes me want that less rather than more. Now granted, I never use mixes anyway, so I'm not the target market. I mean, baking a cake or cookies from ingredients is so simple a 5 year old can do it. my grandma likely never saw a pre-mix in her life, and would (very) never have used one even if it had been available. She lived on a farm, the idea of using a chemistry set to bake cookies ... well, you get the idea. I gotta say, tounge in cheek, if grandma's can't bake cookies anymore because the box size has changed, well, I'm not sure they want to bake at all. Sounds like a convenient excuse to me... But here's how to make your grandma really happy this birthday. Buy a few boxes and repack them into 18oz quantities. You'll be her favorite grandson forever. Or possibly not....
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    They produce different textures and tastes. If you want to reproduce the texture a recipe had, then those are what you need. If not, then don't. But it's not like flour or corn starch or sugar or corn syrup or baking powder are fundamentally different from most of the ingredients listed. It's all refined and modified and engineered. Baking is chemistry. And if you want to be able to make a wide range of textures and tastes, you need to be able to tinker with all those things. Obviously you don't have to, most people stick to the most commonly available ingredients. But then you're just more restricted in the possibilities of what you can make. Maybe that's fine. All depends on what you want to make.
safety1st 1y ago
I never really understood the point of a cake mix in the first place. Admittedly I'm not a grandmother and I don't bake cakes with regularity. But when I do bake them, I just do it from scratch. What's the advantage of a mix? It takes me five minutes to mix the dry ingredients and they're all inexpensive things that most cooks would already have on hand: flour, sugar, a leavener, cocoa powder, etc.
- charles_f 1y ago
  I'm thinking the same. But one of the other repliers pointed out specific ingredients and ratiod that are hard to reproduce, like gelifiers and specific leaveners. My grandma would have scoffed at using cake mix, but she was coming "from the land" and "during", and anything prepared in manufacture was the devil. Her cakes were so much better than anything premixed I've tried. I also think know I just borrow from my own experience to evaluate what I consider to be grandma-like ; my judgment is highly subjective and probably biased by hallo. We sometimes buy premixed when we're lazy, there's nothing wrong with it, but it feels like cheating. We love buying premixed chocolate chip cookies, and making one giant cookie in a dish - for whatever reason I'd never do that witg my own mix.
sneak 1y ago
If you still buy it, you are being played for a fool. I don’t buy shady products like this.
snthd 1y ago
>if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is There are a few interesting paragraphs on it in the book "On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen" (2004) by Harold McGee[0]. (p555) >Modern American Cakes: Help from Modified Fats and Flours Beginning around 1910, several innovations in oil and flour processing led to major changes in American cakes. The first innovation made it possible to leaven cakes with much less work. The hydrogenation of liquid vegetable oils to make solid fats allowed manufacturers to produce specialized shortenings with the ideal properties for incorporating air quickly at room temperature (p. 557). Modern cake shortenings also contain tiny bubbles of nitrogen that provide preformed gas cells for leavening, and emulsifiers that help stabilize the gas cells during mixing and baking, and disperse the fat in droplets that won’t deflate the gas cells. >The second major innovation was the development of specialized cake flour, a soft, low-protein flour that is very finely milled and strongly bleached with chlorine dioxide or chlorine gas. The chlorine treatment turns out to cause the starch granules to absorb water and swell more readily in high-sugar batters, and produce a stronger starch gel. It also causes fats to bind more readily to the starch granule surface, which may help disperse the fat phase more evenly. In combination with the new shortening and with double-acting baking powders, cake flour allowed U.S. food manufacturers to develop “high-ratio” packaged cake mixes, in which the sugar can outweigh the flour by as much as 40%. The texture of the cakes they make is distinctively light and moist, fine and velvety. >Thanks to these qualities and to the convenience of premeasured ingredients, packaged cake mixes were a great success: just 10 years after their major introduction following World War II, they accounted for half of all cakes baked in U.S. homes. The very sweet, tender, moist, light cake became the American standard; and hydrogenated shortening and chlorinated flour became standard kitchen supplies for cakes made “from scratch.” >The Disadvantages of Modified Fats and Flours Hydrogenated vegetable shortenings and chlorinated flour are very useful, but have drawbacks that lead some bakers to avoid them. Hydrogenated shortening does not have the flavor that butter does, and has the more serious disadvantage of containing high levels of trans fatty acids (10-35% compared to butter’s 3-4%; see p. 38). Chlorinated flour has a distinctive taste that some bakers dislike (others find that it enhances cake aroma). And the chlorine ends up in fat-like flour molecules that accumulate in animal bodies. There’s no evidence that this accumulation is harmful, but the European Union and the United Kingdom consider the safety of chlorinated flour unproven, and forbid its use. The U.S. FDA and the World Health Organization consider chlorinated flour a safe ingredient for human consumption. >Manufacturers are addressing some of these problems and uncertainties. For example, the effects of flour chlorination can be approximated by heat treatment, and vegetable oils can be hardened without the production of trans fatty acids. So it’s likely that cooks will eventually be able to make high-ratio cakes with less questionable ingredients. [0] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4110479W/On_food_and_cooking?edition=ia:onfoodcookingsci0000mcge_e4f3 https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4110479W/On_food_and_cooking...
stronglikedan 1y ago
> That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie They aren't trying to fool you, even if it feels that way. They're trying to not retool their entire manufacturing and logistics workflows, which they would have to do to be able to change the outer dimensions of the package.
- fluoridation 1y ago
  Right. It's just a convenient side-effect that consumers are fooled.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    You see this complaint a lot with chip bags, which are mostly air. But chip bags are always mostly air, and can't change, because the air is needed to provide padding that prevents the chips from being ground into dust before you open the bag. This tends to discredit the genre of "the packaging is there to fool the customer" complaints. If you can't identify when the packaging is critical to the product, why listen to any complaints?
    - fluoridation 1y ago
      I think that's a known quantity. Only a child would think a bag of chips is completely filled with chips. In fact, I remember first hearing about this in some science show or something; it hadn't occurred to me before then that the bags were mostly empty, it was just the way chips were packaged. >If you can't identify when the packaging is critical to the product, why listen to any complaints? But you can identity it. Unless this is your very first time buying the product, you more or less know what its packaging looks like. If you buy a can of soda that's half empty you wouldn't think that it's so the liquid doesn't break. Also, I've never heard anyone complain about the size of bags of chips relative to their contents. I've heard the explanations, but not the actual complaints. Is that something people actually do?
      - fragmede 1y ago

moolcool 1y ago

> With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is Ehh, there’s nothing wrong with a recipe containing a shortcut if it works, and standardizing on “a box of cake mix” as a measurement makes sense, because who wants to have 1/10th of a box of cake mix in their cupboard?

bruce511 1y ago
Same people who have flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, milk ‐ pasta, rice, potatoes, ya know, food. I don't eat a whole bag of rice with every meal. I have a plastic tub. Buy rice, fill tub, remove potions as required, repeat. My pantry is full of plastic tubs with various staples. My veggies come in bunches. My eggs in boxes. When did we become so helpless that "the box is the wrong size" became an issue?
- crazygringo 1y ago
  Because we use those ingredients constantly and regularly. You don't usually make a particular type of cookie every week or two. You might only make it once every six months. And your cake mix won't stay good exposed to oxygen for six months. It's not about being helpless, c'mon.
  - bruce511 1y ago
    I think you and I have very different ideas of "helpless". :) "Oh no, the premix is a different size, no more cookies ever" - seems like a pretty helpless response to me. First World Problems I guess...
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      I think you're being extremely judgmental and making a lot of assumptions. I didn't see any "helpless" in the article. I see someone who doesn't want to spend twice the money for no good reason, and then have leftover ingredients they don't have any other use for. It's sad that you seem unable to sympathize with someone else's inconvenience and chose to diminish them instead. When standard ingredient sizes change, that have remained unchanged for decades, and lots of recipes are scaled to match them precisely, you... choose to call people helpless, rather than call it out as corporate greed? It's actually constructive, not "helpless", to stop buying the product, because if enough people do that, the company gets the message and brings back the old size.
    - brian-armstrong 1y ago
      It's time to log off lil bro
  - dml2135 1y ago
    Well this is why it makes sense to bake from standard ingredients like flour that have many different uses, instead of a processed box that can only be used to make one thing.
    - zdragnar 1y ago
      Eh? We eat almost no flour on a daily basis. We might eat cake every few months. "Standard" is not standard at all.
      - dml2135 1y ago
        If you only bake cakes I guess it makes sense — but you can make many other baked goods with flour.
      - bruce511 1y ago
        Yeah, "Standard" will vary a lot from one place to another. For what it's worth, flour is used almost daily here. (We keep several kinds to hand.) We make pizza (ie make the dough) at least once a week. Bread on occasion. Batters for fried fish. As a thickener in sauces and gravys. For making fresh pasta, and so on. All this of course is very cultural. We cook at home. If we eat out once a month it's a lot. We don't get take-aways or fast food. Because (frankly) they're just not that good. So yes, our "standard" leans towards a well-stocked, varied, pantry. And I completely get that this is weird by US standards (although common outside the US).
    - dghlsakjg 1y ago
      Standard flour? Which standard? There are a lot of different kinds of flour. At most well stocked grocers in North America you will find pastry flour, all purpose flour, bread flour, organic flour, self rising flour, etc. That’s just the white wheat flour that you could use to make a cake. Don’t forget that whole wheat and different varietals of wheat exist. If you make cake with bread flour it is going to be very different from one made with pastry flour. There is no such thing as “standard flour”. Hell, even the mill that you use to grind the wheat berry can drastically change the nature of your flour. That’s the whole point of this article. That what you think of as a standard might not be a standard forever, or it might not be a standard at all.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  When recipes that we use called for a box of something. You seem argumentative about this, but it's easy to understand.
- sniffers 1y ago
  I don't know that it's helplessness, I think it's genuinely difficult to notice when a product shrinks in size by an ounce or two and when a chemical composition changes. You probably make one batch, it fails, and now you have to research the size of the previous box and the size of the new box and do a bit of math. It's doable, but also, that's hoping the cake mix hasn't changed chemically. Research and math and experimentation is not zero effort.
- kop316 1y ago
  Assuming you read the article, they address that: "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.'" As someone who likes to cook, I understand this appeal too. I rarely make brownies (one or twice a year), but when I do, I just go to the boxed stuff. It reminds me of my childhood when I made them with my parents and siblings. I could reverse engineer the recipe to mimic what it does (and probably improve it), but given how little I make them, so it isn't high on my list of things to do. Now if they changed the recipe, sure, that may make me motivated enough to reverse engineer the recipe, but I would still be disappointed. I think that's what they are going through. Sure, they could figure out what "1 box" used to be, they could go through the effort of reconstructing it with only from scratch ingredients, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's disappointing to have to go through. Maybe this recipe is one they always made for their kids and now grand-kids.
  - bruce511 1y ago
    I get the nostalgic aspect. But it's not like there aren't a zillion from-scratch brownie recipes to choose from. And since you're doing it twice a year, honestly, get 2 boxes. If throwing away some extra premix destroys the pleasure, then that's a low bar. Would I reverse-engineer the box? No. That sounds like work. But its not hard to find recipes online. Of course with every problem comes opportunity. What I see here is an opportunity for a devoted grandson to box up 18oz of premix for grandma. Grandma's "secret" was that she "cheated", her pleasure was in the feeding not the baking. Enabling grandma to continue this going forward is the easiest thing ever.
    - citizenkeen 1y ago
      “It’s not a problem for me so I struggle to see why it’s a problem for anybody else”. The lack of empathy throughout your comments here is staggering. I’m a fantastic baker. I can bake a much better cake than my grandma ever could, but I can’t bake the cake I had in my childhood without a box. “Just but two” is nonsense dumb advice.
      - 1y ago
- moolcool 1y ago
  Some products are packaged so that one box constitutes one unit, and when they change that units size out of corporate stinginess, it’s inconvenient. It’s very cool that you use fresh bulk ingredients for everything, so this article isn’t about you.
  - account42 1y ago
    The point is that is a self-induced problem or at least one that you can avoid if you take care to not become reliant on some corporation for your "family" recipe.
    - moolcool 1y ago
      You're already reliant on corporations for your family recipes. People ITT are so quick to get all Richard Stallman on their grandmothers for having the gall to use a pre-measured can of Cream of Mushroom soup in their casserole recipe.
      - account42 1y ago
        Yes, we're commenting on an article that would have proven Food Stallman right. Relying on processed flour and similar staples is hardly the same as relying on a specific unique cake mix.

jaggederest 1y ago

> feels like something pretty straight forward to fix. It is actually not. This is something I learned as a lad working in a bakery, professional bakers use all kinds of ingredients not readily available at home. Especially in e.g. boxed cake mix, it's actually a half dozen ingredients that are totally impractical to keep on hand. Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set. The annoying thing is, the ingredient list says "modified food starch", but it could be any of a half a dozen different kinds of modified food starch, with different properties depending on how it's been modified and what the composition of the original starch was. Some are gelling, some are thickening, some are thinning, etc. That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.

bruce511 1y ago
>> Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set. Um. Ok. You say this like it's a good thing? I'll be honest, your statement makes me want that less rather than more. Now granted, I never use mixes anyway, so I'm not the target market. I mean, baking a cake or cookies from ingredients is so simple a 5 year old can do it. my grandma likely never saw a pre-mix in her life, and would (very) never have used one even if it had been available. She lived on a farm, the idea of using a chemistry set to bake cookies ... well, you get the idea. I gotta say, tounge in cheek, if grandma's can't bake cookies anymore because the box size has changed, well, I'm not sure they want to bake at all. Sounds like a convenient excuse to me... But here's how to make your grandma really happy this birthday. Buy a few boxes and repack them into 18oz quantities. You'll be her favorite grandson forever. Or possibly not....
- crazygringo 1y ago
  They produce different textures and tastes. If you want to reproduce the texture a recipe had, then those are what you need. If not, then don't. But it's not like flour or corn starch or sugar or corn syrup or baking powder are fundamentally different from most of the ingredients listed. It's all refined and modified and engineered. Baking is chemistry. And if you want to be able to make a wide range of textures and tastes, you need to be able to tinker with all those things. Obviously you don't have to, most people stick to the most commonly available ingredients. But then you're just more restricted in the possibilities of what you can make. Maybe that's fine. All depends on what you want to make.

safety1st 1y ago

I never really understood the point of a cake mix in the first place. Admittedly I'm not a grandmother and I don't bake cakes with regularity. But when I do bake them, I just do it from scratch. What's the advantage of a mix? It takes me five minutes to mix the dry ingredients and they're all inexpensive things that most cooks would already have on hand: flour, sugar, a leavener, cocoa powder, etc.

charles_f 1y ago
I'm thinking the same. But one of the other repliers pointed out specific ingredients and ratiod that are hard to reproduce, like gelifiers and specific leaveners. My grandma would have scoffed at using cake mix, but she was coming "from the land" and "during", and anything prepared in manufacture was the devil. Her cakes were so much better than anything premixed I've tried. I also think know I just borrow from my own experience to evaluate what I consider to be grandma-like ; my judgment is highly subjective and probably biased by hallo. We sometimes buy premixed when we're lazy, there's nothing wrong with it, but it feels like cheating. We love buying premixed chocolate chip cookies, and making one giant cookie in a dish - for whatever reason I'd never do that witg my own mix.

sneak 1y ago

If you still buy it, you are being played for a fool. I don’t buy shady products like this.

snthd 1y ago

>if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is There are a few interesting paragraphs on it in the book "On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen" (2004) by Harold McGee[0]. (p555) >Modern American Cakes: Help from Modified Fats and Flours Beginning around 1910, several innovations in oil and flour processing led to major changes in American cakes. The first innovation made it possible to leaven cakes with much less work. The hydrogenation of liquid vegetable oils to make solid fats allowed manufacturers to produce specialized shortenings with the ideal properties for incorporating air quickly at room temperature (p. 557). Modern cake shortenings also contain tiny bubbles of nitrogen that provide preformed gas cells for leavening, and emulsifiers that help stabilize the gas cells during mixing and baking, and disperse the fat in droplets that won’t deflate the gas cells. >The second major innovation was the development of specialized cake flour, a soft, low-protein flour that is very finely milled and strongly bleached with chlorine dioxide or chlorine gas. The chlorine treatment turns out to cause the starch granules to absorb water and swell more readily in high-sugar batters, and produce a stronger starch gel. It also causes fats to bind more readily to the starch granule surface, which may help disperse the fat phase more evenly. In combination with the new shortening and with double-acting baking powders, cake flour allowed U.S. food manufacturers to develop “high-ratio” packaged cake mixes, in which the sugar can outweigh the flour by as much as 40%. The texture of the cakes they make is distinctively light and moist, fine and velvety. >Thanks to these qualities and to the convenience of premeasured ingredients, packaged cake mixes were a great success: just 10 years after their major introduction following World War II, they accounted for half of all cakes baked in U.S. homes. The very sweet, tender, moist, light cake became the American standard; and hydrogenated shortening and chlorinated flour became standard kitchen supplies for cakes made “from scratch.” >The Disadvantages of Modified Fats and Flours Hydrogenated vegetable shortenings and chlorinated flour are very useful, but have drawbacks that lead some bakers to avoid them. Hydrogenated shortening does not have the flavor that butter does, and has the more serious disadvantage of containing high levels of trans fatty acids (10-35% compared to butter’s 3-4%; see p. 38). Chlorinated flour has a distinctive taste that some bakers dislike (others find that it enhances cake aroma). And the chlorine ends up in fat-like flour molecules that accumulate in animal bodies. There’s no evidence that this accumulation is harmful, but the European Union and the United Kingdom consider the safety of chlorinated flour unproven, and forbid its use. The U.S. FDA and the World Health Organization consider chlorinated flour a safe ingredient for human consumption. >Manufacturers are addressing some of these problems and uncertainties. For example, the effects of flour chlorination can be approximated by heat treatment, and vegetable oils can be hardened without the production of trans fatty acids. So it’s likely that cooks will eventually be able to make high-ratio cakes with less questionable ingredients. [0] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4110479W/On_food_and_cooking?edition=ia:onfoodcookingsci0000mcge_e4f3 https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4110479W/On_food_and_cooking...

stronglikedan 1y ago

> That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie They aren't trying to fool you, even if it feels that way. They're trying to not retool their entire manufacturing and logistics workflows, which they would have to do to be able to change the outer dimensions of the package.

fluoridation 1y ago
Right. It's just a convenient side-effect that consumers are fooled.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  You see this complaint a lot with chip bags, which are mostly air. But chip bags are always mostly air, and can't change, because the air is needed to provide padding that prevents the chips from being ground into dust before you open the bag. This tends to discredit the genre of "the packaging is there to fool the customer" complaints. If you can't identify when the packaging is critical to the product, why listen to any complaints?
  - fluoridation 1y ago
    I think that's a known quantity. Only a child would think a bag of chips is completely filled with chips. In fact, I remember first hearing about this in some science show or something; it hadn't occurred to me before then that the bags were mostly empty, it was just the way chips were packaged. >If you can't identify when the packaging is critical to the product, why listen to any complaints? But you can identity it. Unless this is your very first time buying the product, you more or less know what its packaging looks like. If you buy a can of soda that's half empty you wouldn't think that it's so the liquid doesn't break. Also, I've never heard anyone complain about the size of bags of chips relative to their contents. I've heard the explanations, but not the actual complaints. Is that something people actually do?
    - fragmede 1y ago