Thanks for that. So there are basically three things he mentions:

1. Emulsifiers actually make the texture better

2. The flour they use has had some extra steps

3. They can use industrial machinery to smash their shortening and flour together in a way that's really not possible in a kitchen, that does make the texture better.

As someone else has said, it should in theory be possible to buy "better" flour; and you could buy emulsifiers, or use more egg yolk (which has a natural emulsifier), or use Crisco (which the video says has emulsifiers in it). So it's really the last one that's not easily replicate-able at home.

There is one thing he keeps repeating which I disagree with: "You're not going to be able to do a better job of engineering than the experts at Duncan Hines." Yes, both Duncan Hines and I are optimizing in part for taste. And I have some constraints compared with Duncan Hines: I don't have industrial grade machinery to mash shortening into flour; I can't experiment with and precisely measure an arbitrary number of potentially exotic ingredients.

But Duncan Hines has several additional constraints they're optimizing against which don't apply to me: They have to make it simple enough for an average person to make. They have to aim for a "median" palate. They have to make it shelf-stable for years. They have the pressure to shave pennies off the cost (as evidenced by TFA), which may mean (e.g.) buying cheaper chocolate or using a lightly lower quality fat than would be ideal.

So I disagree that it's a given that Duncan Hines' cake mix will be better than something I can make from scratch.

I will, however, concede that there are reasonable advantages to using a "commercial base".

Also, premade mixes are a godsend if you or a family member needs a gluten-free diet. I haven't (yet) noticed any shrinkflation, but I've certainly noticed that the King Arthur gluten-free muffin mix is noticeably more generous than any of the others I've tried.

Relevant content begins at 03:40

But I'm not sure why they think I can't but the same emulsifiers etc online or at the local Asian grocery store.

Spam is a hell of a lot harder to make than cake mix. Cake mix is literally just measuring, and what was in the box when your mom made it isn't from the same suppliers, or probably of the same quality, as what's in the box now.

I was actually quite fond of it as a soup when I was young --- then I broke my jaw on the first day of summer vacation when I was 14 and after 6 weeks of living on various liquid foods, haven't had it since.

My mom always used Campbell's Cream of Chicken soup as gravy to put on white rice when I was a kid. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I learned it was actually a soup. Mentally, there is now way I could eat it that way. It'd feel like I was just eating gravy.

Yes, I’ve eaten it as soup for decades. It’s great with some pasta mixed through it too.

That was my sister’s favorite soup as a kid. I ended up having it a lot as a result as well.

Oh no they don't.

I'm not sure a blanket statement like that can be made just because this will be so subjective and anecdotal. From a brief google, it would look pretty split. AI summary falls on the homemade cake mix side, but reading through some of the blog posts from both sides, I would really hesitate to view any of them as reliable just because bakers are going to be biased towards their preferred method, both psychologically and skill-wise. From my experience in baking competitions, my family and I have had better luck with homemade mixes.

I'm not disagreeing since taste is subjective, and for blind taste tests I could definitely see most people choosing what they are used to which would probably be box mixes. I'd be interested to see if culturally it's different since I think box mixes are generally more popular in the USA.

yes for your health

Totally false, in large part because a real cake recipe is not usually just a collection of dry ingredients and an egg, the way Betty Crocker usually is.

Box mixes use powdered milks. Powdered vanilla flavor. They use the cheapest powdered chocolate. Sometimes they don't even both making you throw in an egg because they use powdered egg.

I don't care how precisely that's measured, it's not going to be as good as my recipe with fresh eggs, fresh milk, real vanilla, and good quality bars of baking chocolate.

And that's even setting aside techniques. My favorite chocolate cake involves pouring boiling water into the ingredients, because of the way it melts the chocolate. Show me a Betty Crocker mix that does that.

Obviously if the only recipe you've seen from scratch is just a replica of the things in the box (and you use similarly low-quality ingredients) then sure, having the precise measurements is nice, I guess.

Baking may not be easy but it’s not that hard.

If you bake from scratch, then maybe your results won’t be as good at first, but like anything else you will get better with experience and improve with time.

Like, would you suggest people only eat frozen TV dinners because the results will be more consistent than if they cooked a meal themselves?

Consistency is hard, but quality isn't.

If I use my eggs from neighbor's chickens, fancy chocolate, and organic milk from a local dairy, the cake is going to taste better (90% from the better chocolate honestly).

Quality improvements are easy.

Consistency is harder, but anyone with a kitchen scale and half an eye for detail should be able to pull it off. It takes me 3 or 4 goes at a recipe before I get super consistent with it, but it isn't rocket science (which also demands consistency!)

> What about a smaller cake or bigger one?

Boxes don't help here since their cooking instructions are for a fixed dimension, changing the cake size significantly for even boxed cakes requires understanding what you are doing. Again, not hard, but it isn't a win for box cakes.

> In reality, most cakes can be made by dumping the ingredients together in a bowl, mixing, and then baking.

Most 'proper' baking needs a scale, and how many American kitchens have that?

So confidently incorrect. The proof that they add value is in their popularity. They also do, in fact, contain ingredients that people don't have at home, which matter.

The only thing they as is most people don't have cake flour even though it is near the flour in the store. (5 boxes vs a whole shelf of all purpose). Little things like that matter but many try to cheat anyway and then the box is better.

This is a useful thing to know when writing instructions on how to bake 1000 Betty Crocker cakes

Also 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.

I always doubled "an egg and a white" as "two eggs and two whites". Whites and yolks are very different and make the end result very different.

Volume-based measurements, too. One person's "half a cup" is not another's.

I've been much happier since I started weighing everything.

Getting a new oven has invalidated every single time written down in a recipe here. (usually not too hard to adjust, but still)

Baking 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.

I mean, also, when was the last time you had your oven properly calibrated? How sure are you that it's actually 350 F?

The 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.

Or measure flour by weight instead of volume.

Flour should be weighed.