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Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients. There's nothing wrong with using processed food in a recipe. I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "

Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients. There's nothing wrong with using processed food in a recipe. I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced. Cooking is not always about making the ultimate gourmet meal, it's about connection and tradition. Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives and makes it's way into traditions. Grandma's secret recipe that uses a box mix will taste 10000x better than anything you think you can come up with from scratch. Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise, it's not something you just do perfectly the first time. To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience, or a box mix.

cmbuck 1y ago
[flagged]
- lifeformed 1y ago
  If someone is eating cakes at the scale at which the artificial ingredients are causing issues, the nutritional content of the cake itself would overtake most of the problems. A lot of scary sounding processed ingredients are perfectly safe and as natural as like orange juice or cheese. I know it's more ideal to eat a perfect from-scratch cake, but I wouldn't let a few processed ingredients get in the way of appreciating the cultural and social aspects of someone making a cake for me.
  - bruce511 1y ago
    The problem is indeed not processed ingredients in cake. Unfortunately, in the US, those ingredients are not limited to cake. And yes, most industrial, chemical, ingredients are harmless. That said, around the world, there's a emphasis on non-processed food. Unprocessed foods tend towards healthier. Less added sugar, less saturated fat etc. I guess, taken as an overall picture, American health is perceived as poor. Poor food choices. Poor food-related outcomes and so on. That's predicated on a food culture that prioritizes cost, profit, quantity, ubiquity etc over health and quality. Taken in that light, arguing in favor of processed foods seems like a outcome most countries would like to avoid.
  - Theodores 1y ago
    C'mon now, orange juice or cheese - perfectly safe? Unless you are specifically out to gain weight or needing extra calories due to hard work, you should not be drinking your calories. With orange juice you have sugars stripped from fibre and you can glug the sugars in a dozen oranges just glugging away for a few seconds. To eat those oranges would take an hour if you had to peel them first. Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way. Cakes are just fats, sugars and additives, sometimes with some fruit in there, but you are right, these things have to be consumed just because it is a cultural tradition. Healthy cigarettes are just as easy to find, and cigarettes are arguably a cultural tradition. The more you look into it, the more messed up it is. Chocolate is particularly messed up, with small children that should be at school sifting the beans for us in Ghana. Then there is climate change, with cocoa supplies being so low at the moment. Undoubtedly cake brings joy but there is all of this misery and cruelty that goes into the ingredients. Haven't even got as far as where the red food colouring comes from. Yet it all started so innocently.
    - komali2 1y ago
      > Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way. At least no almonds got jerked off in the process. People have been eating cheese and yogurt for ten thousand years. It's not weird - trying to make it weird is weird! I'm not trying to be mean, but I am giving unsolicited feedback - trying that angle to convince people to not eat cheese is only gonna work on your choir. Everyone else is gonna wonder why tf you're thinking of bulls being jerked off, and then go right back to enjoying cheese. Certain varieties have excellent macros and price ratios so the health angle doesn't really work either. Nobody's asking but personally I think the best path for vegans to take is the Impossible meat angle. I know folks that prefer it now that were 16oz steak guys. It's healthier and yummy and priced just about the same as a normal burger. Whip up the same for cheese and you're in business. Right now all the cheese alternatives are kinda bad and also give me the worst farts lol.
  - apparent 1y ago
    Agreed, but you claimed above that: > I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced. That is simply untrue. It does not take an experienced baker to make a better cake than a boxed cake mix. The fact that you can avoid the other weird ingredients (which are probably not terrible at small scale) is just the icing on the cake.
    - joncrocks 1y ago
      Just to push back on this slightly, I'm sure I've watched Youtube videos with someone who bake cakes for a living who said they used boxed mixture for most of their baking. As others have said elsewhere, some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker. This means it's more than possible that you will get an objectively better cake from a mix, e.g. from blind tasting. This does depend on the type of cake you're baking and your expectations of 'better' though.
      - ricardobeat 1y ago
        Do you have an example of these unreachable ingredients? The main ones - dextrose, whey, emulsifiers - can be found at any supermarket as "bread improver" or "dough conditioner" mix. Maybe expectations for cake in the USA are different from the rest of the world, like it is for sliced bread (soft as a pillow). I seriously doubt bakeries in most of europe use cake mixes, or at least nothing with a similar laundry list of chemicals.
      - apparent 1y ago
        > someone who bake cakes for a living who said they used boxed mixture for most of their baking. Would love to see such a video. I could imagine using certain box mixes for certain specific purposes, but for most of their baking? I cannot imagine this being claimed by even a casual cook/baker. > some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker Sure, but some of these are also only necessary because the box has to have a very long shelf life. If you buy your staple ingredients every month or two, you don't need stabilizers and such.
      - 1y ago
BenFranklin100 1y ago
Oh, that’s just not true. Buy a cookbook or two. It’s not hard to bake a decent cake from ingredients unless you’re grossly incompetent in the kitchen.
- cogman10 1y ago
  The exotic ingredients are often there either because a normal ingredient would spoil or can't be powdered. Fats, for example, are a major part of some baking and those cannot be dried out and will go rancid in a box. It can seem intimidating until you realize that an egg, a pat of butter, or milk are just mishmashes of compounds not always easily added in mass production. (Yes, you can powder milk and eggs, in some baking it's just fine in other it messes with the flavor).
bruce511 1y ago
Mate, you are so wrong here, but I completely accept that your belief here is not unique. Firstly, there's a lot wrong with using processed foods, but I'll skip over that. If processed food is now "traditional" then that's a bit sad. Really. Secondly, made from scratch tastes way better than box mix. Because, you know, flavors. Now I get that tastes, especially nostalgic tastes, are very subjective so YMMV. But processed foods are always made to fit a broad market, so are typically bland. Cake mixes typically use sugar as "flavor", so "tastes good" to someone raised on an American diet will tend to lean on high-fat, high-sugar. Outside the US the emphasis is more on flavor than sugar. A coffee cake has a strong coffee taste. A chocolate cake uses real chocolate and so on. Using better ingredients makes for a better result. Getting consistenty in baking is really not hard. Yes, it takes a bit of practice. But it's a skill a child can learn. My son was baking by himself at 6 years old. It really isn't hard. And it really does turn out better. And ultimately it has better food value as well. Yes, I agree, that US culture is different. The days of grandma teaching kids to bake, of parents teaching kids to bake or cook is dwindling. It's sad to see this learned helplessness in the kitchen, which then leads to dependence on "big food" to decide what you eat. Fortunately they prioritize your health, not their profit. Personally I'm grateful that my elders taught me to cook, and something I taught to my kids. If you are able to, I recommend it as a skill with passing on. Calling it "snobby" suggests that it is a skill you have not yet acquired. And indeed a skill you feel you cannot acquire. You are incorrect. It is easy to do, you really can learn how, and the results are far superior.
- lifeformed 1y ago
  What I am calling snobby is to look down on grandma's cooking because she used processed foods. Normal, everyday families around the world use processed foods in their cooking. In the US Midwest a tradition is to use a box cake mix as a base and add to it flavorful additions, like homemade jams, fruits, whipped cream, etc. If I went to someone's house and their grandma served to me, it would be extremely snobbish to think to myself, "heh, this has boxed mix in it, she doesn't know what TRUE cake is". Also, why would calling that "snobby" imply that I don't know how to bake? That's a lot more of a snobby statement, to say that I must be unskilled since I don't judge food based solely on having "the best flavor". I worked in a bakery and have made a lot of baked goods, from scratch, in a professional setting. I'm not saying boxed cakes are the best cakes. They have consistently good texture and moisture, which is not an easy feat. I would like the emphasize "consistency". Yes, any child can make a simple cake recipe. But to do it well every time, in any kitchen, at different scales, is not trivial. The flavors are not always the best but that's where you can customize it. Sure I would take a well-made made-from-scratch cake over a boxed one any day. But the point of these recipes is the traditions behind it. Part of why mom and grandma could make a whole Thanksgiving feast and array of desserts is because many shortcuts can be taken, including using a boxed mix. That efficiency is part of the tradition behind recipes handed down from grandparents, in the same way that "poverty food" is born from constraints of the era. The value behind creative expressions is not just the artifact but the efforts and intentions of the creators behind it.
schiffern 1y ago
>Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients. Surfactants/emulsifiers, from that list, have been connected to leaky gut ('emulsifying' protective mucus) which causes inflammation. This is hypothesized to be one of the mechanisms by which ultra-processed food causes a constellation of diseases. Be snobby about cake ingredients. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9331555/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9331555/ https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-020-00996-6 https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...
- malfist 1y ago
  Leaky gut is a myth. It's used to scare people and sell things. If you don't believe me, feel free to read it's Wikipedia page.
  - SapporoChris 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_gut_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_gut_syndrome Thank you, I'd not read it was a myth before and had confused it with another condition 'worsening allergy symptoms due to the effects of alcohol'. Sorry, I couldn't find a good link to describe the effect but did see numerous websites mentioning that alcohol can worsen allergy symptoms. My allergist informed me that alcohol dilates the blood vessels allowing more allergens to pass thru. My anecdotal evidence is that I do seem to suffer from more food allergies when I drink alcohol. Foods that I have a mild allergy to become seem to be more problematic when I drink.
  - ricardobeat 1y ago
    "Leaky gut" might be a myth, but emulsifiers' impact on gut health is not. A steady stream of studies [1] and publications on this [2] has been coming out, since the role of our microbiome became more clear. [1] ex https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06224-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06224-3 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/29/the-truth-about-emulsifiers-gut-health-microbiome https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/29/the-tru...
yAak 1y ago
Box cake mix almost never tastes better than scratch. Next you’ll tell me store-bought frosting tastes better?
- malfist 1y ago
  Just the other day I was making brownies and I always make them from scratch, but my partner has been making a particular box mix forever and thought I'd buy one and try it since its easier than from scratch. But it wasn't better. I like to get a nice glossy top on a brownie with a fudgy consistency under it. The glossy top cracks when you bite into it and it's amazing. But there's no way to do that with a box mix. The top comes from whipping air into the butter, egg and sugar mixture but a box mix is one bag. You try to beat air into it and you develop the gluten and it turns out terrible. Box mixes are acceptable. But they don't beat from scratch by a long shot, unless its your first time or to ever for baking.
  - sersi 1y ago
    And box mix tend to be overly sweet (at least from my limited experience tasting then when I was a student in the us)
- phil21 1y ago
  Cake mixes almost always come ahead in blind taste tests. Very few bakers short of folks with a lot of volume are doing stuff from scratch. It may or may not be healthier, but the subjective taste preferences of the masses is pretty much settled fact at this point. Frosting is a different topic - totally agree there, but I haven't seen any blind taste tests on that one. The professional bakers around me who do a dozen cakes a day or whatnot are all pre-made mixes, maybe some small modifications to the mix, and from-scratch frostings. I'm not sure I could even find a local spot with cakes made from scratch - at least in the traditional sense. The spots making 200 cakes a day perhaps, but those are going to look a lot more like the mixes you buy from Sysco or whatnot.
  - deleted 1y ago
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apparent 1y ago
My child baked a cake from scratch and it tasted better than a box of cake mix. It took much more time, but it was healthier and tastier than cake from mix. We still use brownie mix though, with adaptations, for making brownies and chocolate cookies.
zarzavat 1y ago
I'd much rather eat a cake that has the texture of a cake rather than some food science abomination. It's corporations that have taught you to desire the wrong definition of a cake. Grandmas should not be cooking cakes from boxes of cake dust, they should be using flour and producing a cake that tastes like it was cooked by a grandma. That is the natural order of things. Being made with traditional methods and ingredients, is per se a virtue. If grandma cooks fries you wouldn't complain that McDonalds does it better. Home cooking is great because it was cooked at home using the limited equipment and ingredients of a home kitchen that give it a natural and traditional taste.
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  Using limited equipment is not a virtue. And the odds that ingredients found in nature are ideal ingredients by sheer chance are about 0%. And we haven't been making cakes long enough to for evolution to turn natural into ideal. Let people like what they like.
  - deleted 1y ago
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- simoncion 1y ago
  > If grandma cooks fries you wouldn't complain that McDonalds does it better. If the fries are bad, I definitely would. I might not complain where the grandma could hear, but food doesn't magically become good because a grandma cooks it. I've had plenty of godawful meals cooked up by grandmas. Work isn't inherently valuable. We value the results of that work.
- account42 1y ago
  Exactly. "Home cooking" that results in something that may as well be store bought as a finished product is kinda weird.
formerly_proven 1y ago
Box cakes aren't much of a thing in other places, I would be very surprised if any grandma's recipe would include "box cake" here. (I have, in fact, never seen any cake recipe here include box cake)
- cocoto 1y ago
  Box cakes are widely available in most of Europe. They taste more than ok but sure nobody here would claim it’s a family recipe.
  - formerly_proven 1y ago
    Available, sure, but the small sliver they get in the baking aisle probably says all you need to know about the turnover they generate.
campital 1y ago
"A Man Ate Expired Boxed Cake Mix. This Is How His Organs Shut Down." (Frozen Hot Sauce, iykyk)
- pertymcpert 1y ago
  something something presence in blood...
sdoering 1y ago
> Grandma's secret recipe that uses a box mix will taste 10000x better than anything you think you can come up with from scratch. Made my day. I would bet you my monthly salary, if I wouldn't have to suspect - based on the quoted sentence - that your taste buds are already fully dorked up based on the crap you put into your cake hole from years of industrialized and processed food-simulacrum. > Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise It actually isn't once you understand a few basic principals. If you need a box of cake dust to bake, you cannot bake. That's it. And if grandma needs that, she actually never learned to bake. Baking is so damn simple for 90+ percent of cakes. Yes, if you want to get all fancy - we are talking a different ball game. But the sames can be said about cooking for fine dining. > To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience Just not true. Learn the basic principles (share of dry vs wet ingredients and such base level things) and not just try copying a recipe, basically cargo culting. About the taste of things: When I learned what actual food tastes like it was in many ways interesting. First it was very often quite disappointing. Because a lot of things did not taste how I would have expected they would taste. Take strawberries for example. They did not taste as sweet, not as "intense", bland even. But over time, I got to learn the different tastes of different varieties of strawberries and how rich they are, a richness, that I never knew. My taste buds "just" had to unlearn the overly intense way industry does with aroma and shit. I had to learn what strawberries (and many other things) really taste, compared to the artificially aromatised crap the industry is telling is is "strawberry flavor". Nowadays, with over 100 varieties of tomatoes for example in our own greenhouses, I enjoy a vastness of taste variations when eating a simple salad. Or baked tomatoes from the oven. I would never, never trade that for industrialized crap. > Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives Poor every day people. I pity them. And yes: I might definitely be a snob, when it comes to what goes into my body. My body is the only one I got - why should I treat it to sub par crap.
- pests 1y ago
  Nah not just a snob.
- moolcool 1y ago
  > Poor every day people. I pity them I'm sorry, but this reads like a piece of Ignatius Reilly dialog.
jamincan 1y ago
My Beppe's (Frisian grandmother) boterkoek (butter cake) was a well-loved staple at church and school bake sales. She closely guarded her recipe, but shared it with my eldest sister who, after she died, told me that she actually used margarine instead of butter in her recipe. Everyone, not even just her family, loved her boterkoek, and yet it didn't even have butter in it.

cmbuck 1y ago

[flagged]

lifeformed 1y ago
If someone is eating cakes at the scale at which the artificial ingredients are causing issues, the nutritional content of the cake itself would overtake most of the problems. A lot of scary sounding processed ingredients are perfectly safe and as natural as like orange juice or cheese. I know it's more ideal to eat a perfect from-scratch cake, but I wouldn't let a few processed ingredients get in the way of appreciating the cultural and social aspects of someone making a cake for me.
- bruce511 1y ago
  The problem is indeed not processed ingredients in cake. Unfortunately, in the US, those ingredients are not limited to cake. And yes, most industrial, chemical, ingredients are harmless. That said, around the world, there's a emphasis on non-processed food. Unprocessed foods tend towards healthier. Less added sugar, less saturated fat etc. I guess, taken as an overall picture, American health is perceived as poor. Poor food choices. Poor food-related outcomes and so on. That's predicated on a food culture that prioritizes cost, profit, quantity, ubiquity etc over health and quality. Taken in that light, arguing in favor of processed foods seems like a outcome most countries would like to avoid.
- Theodores 1y ago
  C'mon now, orange juice or cheese - perfectly safe? Unless you are specifically out to gain weight or needing extra calories due to hard work, you should not be drinking your calories. With orange juice you have sugars stripped from fibre and you can glug the sugars in a dozen oranges just glugging away for a few seconds. To eat those oranges would take an hour if you had to peel them first. Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way. Cakes are just fats, sugars and additives, sometimes with some fruit in there, but you are right, these things have to be consumed just because it is a cultural tradition. Healthy cigarettes are just as easy to find, and cigarettes are arguably a cultural tradition. The more you look into it, the more messed up it is. Chocolate is particularly messed up, with small children that should be at school sifting the beans for us in Ghana. Then there is climate change, with cocoa supplies being so low at the moment. Undoubtedly cake brings joy but there is all of this misery and cruelty that goes into the ingredients. Haven't even got as far as where the red food colouring comes from. Yet it all started so innocently.
  - komali2 1y ago
    > Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way. At least no almonds got jerked off in the process. People have been eating cheese and yogurt for ten thousand years. It's not weird - trying to make it weird is weird! I'm not trying to be mean, but I am giving unsolicited feedback - trying that angle to convince people to not eat cheese is only gonna work on your choir. Everyone else is gonna wonder why tf you're thinking of bulls being jerked off, and then go right back to enjoying cheese. Certain varieties have excellent macros and price ratios so the health angle doesn't really work either. Nobody's asking but personally I think the best path for vegans to take is the Impossible meat angle. I know folks that prefer it now that were 16oz steak guys. It's healthier and yummy and priced just about the same as a normal burger. Whip up the same for cheese and you're in business. Right now all the cheese alternatives are kinda bad and also give me the worst farts lol.
- apparent 1y ago
  Agreed, but you claimed above that: > I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced. That is simply untrue. It does not take an experienced baker to make a better cake than a boxed cake mix. The fact that you can avoid the other weird ingredients (which are probably not terrible at small scale) is just the icing on the cake.
  - joncrocks 1y ago
    Just to push back on this slightly, I'm sure I've watched Youtube videos with someone who bake cakes for a living who said they used boxed mixture for most of their baking. As others have said elsewhere, some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker. This means it's more than possible that you will get an objectively better cake from a mix, e.g. from blind tasting. This does depend on the type of cake you're baking and your expectations of 'better' though.
    - ricardobeat 1y ago
      Do you have an example of these unreachable ingredients? The main ones - dextrose, whey, emulsifiers - can be found at any supermarket as "bread improver" or "dough conditioner" mix. Maybe expectations for cake in the USA are different from the rest of the world, like it is for sliced bread (soft as a pillow). I seriously doubt bakeries in most of europe use cake mixes, or at least nothing with a similar laundry list of chemicals.
    - apparent 1y ago
      > someone who bake cakes for a living who said they used boxed mixture for most of their baking. Would love to see such a video. I could imagine using certain box mixes for certain specific purposes, but for most of their baking? I cannot imagine this being claimed by even a casual cook/baker. > some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker Sure, but some of these are also only necessary because the box has to have a very long shelf life. If you buy your staple ingredients every month or two, you don't need stabilizers and such.
    - 1y ago

BenFranklin100 1y ago

Oh, that’s just not true. Buy a cookbook or two. It’s not hard to bake a decent cake from ingredients unless you’re grossly incompetent in the kitchen.

cogman10 1y ago
The exotic ingredients are often there either because a normal ingredient would spoil or can't be powdered. Fats, for example, are a major part of some baking and those cannot be dried out and will go rancid in a box. It can seem intimidating until you realize that an egg, a pat of butter, or milk are just mishmashes of compounds not always easily added in mass production. (Yes, you can powder milk and eggs, in some baking it's just fine in other it messes with the flavor).

bruce511 1y ago

Mate, you are so wrong here, but I completely accept that your belief here is not unique. Firstly, there's a lot wrong with using processed foods, but I'll skip over that. If processed food is now "traditional" then that's a bit sad. Really. Secondly, made from scratch tastes way better than box mix. Because, you know, flavors. Now I get that tastes, especially nostalgic tastes, are very subjective so YMMV. But processed foods are always made to fit a broad market, so are typically bland. Cake mixes typically use sugar as "flavor", so "tastes good" to someone raised on an American diet will tend to lean on high-fat, high-sugar. Outside the US the emphasis is more on flavor than sugar. A coffee cake has a strong coffee taste. A chocolate cake uses real chocolate and so on. Using better ingredients makes for a better result. Getting consistenty in baking is really not hard. Yes, it takes a bit of practice. But it's a skill a child can learn. My son was baking by himself at 6 years old. It really isn't hard. And it really does turn out better. And ultimately it has better food value as well. Yes, I agree, that US culture is different. The days of grandma teaching kids to bake, of parents teaching kids to bake or cook is dwindling. It's sad to see this learned helplessness in the kitchen, which then leads to dependence on "big food" to decide what you eat. Fortunately they prioritize your health, not their profit. Personally I'm grateful that my elders taught me to cook, and something I taught to my kids. If you are able to, I recommend it as a skill with passing on. Calling it "snobby" suggests that it is a skill you have not yet acquired. And indeed a skill you feel you cannot acquire. You are incorrect. It is easy to do, you really can learn how, and the results are far superior.

lifeformed 1y ago
What I am calling snobby is to look down on grandma's cooking because she used processed foods. Normal, everyday families around the world use processed foods in their cooking. In the US Midwest a tradition is to use a box cake mix as a base and add to it flavorful additions, like homemade jams, fruits, whipped cream, etc. If I went to someone's house and their grandma served to me, it would be extremely snobbish to think to myself, "heh, this has boxed mix in it, she doesn't know what TRUE cake is". Also, why would calling that "snobby" imply that I don't know how to bake? That's a lot more of a snobby statement, to say that I must be unskilled since I don't judge food based solely on having "the best flavor". I worked in a bakery and have made a lot of baked goods, from scratch, in a professional setting. I'm not saying boxed cakes are the best cakes. They have consistently good texture and moisture, which is not an easy feat. I would like the emphasize "consistency". Yes, any child can make a simple cake recipe. But to do it well every time, in any kitchen, at different scales, is not trivial. The flavors are not always the best but that's where you can customize it. Sure I would take a well-made made-from-scratch cake over a boxed one any day. But the point of these recipes is the traditions behind it. Part of why mom and grandma could make a whole Thanksgiving feast and array of desserts is because many shortcuts can be taken, including using a boxed mix. That efficiency is part of the tradition behind recipes handed down from grandparents, in the same way that "poverty food" is born from constraints of the era. The value behind creative expressions is not just the artifact but the efforts and intentions of the creators behind it.

schiffern 1y ago

>Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients. Surfactants/emulsifiers, from that list, have been connected to leaky gut ('emulsifying' protective mucus) which causes inflammation. This is hypothesized to be one of the mechanisms by which ultra-processed food causes a constellation of diseases. Be snobby about cake ingredients. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9331555/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9331555/ https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-020-00996-6 https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...

malfist 1y ago
Leaky gut is a myth. It's used to scare people and sell things. If you don't believe me, feel free to read it's Wikipedia page.
- SapporoChris 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_gut_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_gut_syndrome Thank you, I'd not read it was a myth before and had confused it with another condition 'worsening allergy symptoms due to the effects of alcohol'. Sorry, I couldn't find a good link to describe the effect but did see numerous websites mentioning that alcohol can worsen allergy symptoms. My allergist informed me that alcohol dilates the blood vessels allowing more allergens to pass thru. My anecdotal evidence is that I do seem to suffer from more food allergies when I drink alcohol. Foods that I have a mild allergy to become seem to be more problematic when I drink.
- ricardobeat 1y ago
  "Leaky gut" might be a myth, but emulsifiers' impact on gut health is not. A steady stream of studies [1] and publications on this [2] has been coming out, since the role of our microbiome became more clear. [1] ex https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06224-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06224-3 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/29/the-truth-about-emulsifiers-gut-health-microbiome https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/29/the-tru...

yAak 1y ago

Box cake mix almost never tastes better than scratch. Next you’ll tell me store-bought frosting tastes better?

malfist 1y ago
Just the other day I was making brownies and I always make them from scratch, but my partner has been making a particular box mix forever and thought I'd buy one and try it since its easier than from scratch. But it wasn't better. I like to get a nice glossy top on a brownie with a fudgy consistency under it. The glossy top cracks when you bite into it and it's amazing. But there's no way to do that with a box mix. The top comes from whipping air into the butter, egg and sugar mixture but a box mix is one bag. You try to beat air into it and you develop the gluten and it turns out terrible. Box mixes are acceptable. But they don't beat from scratch by a long shot, unless its your first time or to ever for baking.
- sersi 1y ago
  And box mix tend to be overly sweet (at least from my limited experience tasting then when I was a student in the us)
phil21 1y ago
Cake mixes almost always come ahead in blind taste tests. Very few bakers short of folks with a lot of volume are doing stuff from scratch. It may or may not be healthier, but the subjective taste preferences of the masses is pretty much settled fact at this point. Frosting is a different topic - totally agree there, but I haven't seen any blind taste tests on that one. The professional bakers around me who do a dozen cakes a day or whatnot are all pre-made mixes, maybe some small modifications to the mix, and from-scratch frostings. I'm not sure I could even find a local spot with cakes made from scratch - at least in the traditional sense. The spots making 200 cakes a day perhaps, but those are going to look a lot more like the mixes you buy from Sysco or whatnot.
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apparent 1y ago

My child baked a cake from scratch and it tasted better than a box of cake mix. It took much more time, but it was healthier and tastier than cake from mix. We still use brownie mix though, with adaptations, for making brownies and chocolate cookies.

zarzavat 1y ago

I'd much rather eat a cake that has the texture of a cake rather than some food science abomination. It's corporations that have taught you to desire the wrong definition of a cake. Grandmas should not be cooking cakes from boxes of cake dust, they should be using flour and producing a cake that tastes like it was cooked by a grandma. That is the natural order of things. Being made with traditional methods and ingredients, is per se a virtue. If grandma cooks fries you wouldn't complain that McDonalds does it better. Home cooking is great because it was cooked at home using the limited equipment and ingredients of a home kitchen that give it a natural and traditional taste.

Dylan16807 1y ago
Using limited equipment is not a virtue. And the odds that ingredients found in nature are ideal ingredients by sheer chance are about 0%. And we haven't been making cakes long enough to for evolution to turn natural into ideal. Let people like what they like.
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simoncion 1y ago
> If grandma cooks fries you wouldn't complain that McDonalds does it better. If the fries are bad, I definitely would. I might not complain where the grandma could hear, but food doesn't magically become good because a grandma cooks it. I've had plenty of godawful meals cooked up by grandmas. Work isn't inherently valuable. We value the results of that work.
account42 1y ago
Exactly. "Home cooking" that results in something that may as well be store bought as a finished product is kinda weird.

formerly_proven 1y ago

Box cakes aren't much of a thing in other places, I would be very surprised if any grandma's recipe would include "box cake" here. (I have, in fact, never seen any cake recipe here include box cake)

cocoto 1y ago
Box cakes are widely available in most of Europe. They taste more than ok but sure nobody here would claim it’s a family recipe.
- formerly_proven 1y ago
  Available, sure, but the small sliver they get in the baking aisle probably says all you need to know about the turnover they generate.

campital 1y ago

"A Man Ate Expired Boxed Cake Mix. This Is How His Organs Shut Down." (Frozen Hot Sauce, iykyk)

pertymcpert 1y ago
something something presence in blood...

sdoering 1y ago

> Grandma's secret recipe that uses a box mix will taste 10000x better than anything you think you can come up with from scratch. Made my day. I would bet you my monthly salary, if I wouldn't have to suspect - based on the quoted sentence - that your taste buds are already fully dorked up based on the crap you put into your cake hole from years of industrialized and processed food-simulacrum. > Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise It actually isn't once you understand a few basic principals. If you need a box of cake dust to bake, you cannot bake. That's it. And if grandma needs that, she actually never learned to bake. Baking is so damn simple for 90+ percent of cakes. Yes, if you want to get all fancy - we are talking a different ball game. But the sames can be said about cooking for fine dining. > To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience Just not true. Learn the basic principles (share of dry vs wet ingredients and such base level things) and not just try copying a recipe, basically cargo culting. About the taste of things: When I learned what actual food tastes like it was in many ways interesting. First it was very often quite disappointing. Because a lot of things did not taste how I would have expected they would taste. Take strawberries for example. They did not taste as sweet, not as "intense", bland even. But over time, I got to learn the different tastes of different varieties of strawberries and how rich they are, a richness, that I never knew. My taste buds "just" had to unlearn the overly intense way industry does with aroma and shit. I had to learn what strawberries (and many other things) really taste, compared to the artificially aromatised crap the industry is telling is is "strawberry flavor". Nowadays, with over 100 varieties of tomatoes for example in our own greenhouses, I enjoy a vastness of taste variations when eating a simple salad. Or baked tomatoes from the oven. I would never, never trade that for industrialized crap. > Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives Poor every day people. I pity them. And yes: I might definitely be a snob, when it comes to what goes into my body. My body is the only one I got - why should I treat it to sub par crap.

pests 1y ago
Nah not just a snob.
moolcool 1y ago
> Poor every day people. I pity them I'm sorry, but this reads like a piece of Ignatius Reilly dialog.

jamincan 1y ago

My Beppe's (Frisian grandmother) boterkoek (butter cake) was a well-loved staple at church and school bake sales. She closely guarded her recipe, but shared it with my eldest sister who, after she died, told me that she actually used margarine instead of butter in her recipe. Everyone, not even just her family, loved her boterkoek, and yet it didn't even have butter in it.