| If you look up the purpose of the various ingredients you quickly find that they are simply filling roles that other more commonly used household ingredients can take with minimal to no impact on flavor. Dextrins, for example, are simply thickening agents. Corn starch/potato starch. glycerides are literally just fats and added because most fats can't be powdered. Butter works just as well and is in fact preferable. Surfactants are soap, often simply used for emulsification. There's a bunch of cooking techniques to achieve that but, frankly, it's often not needed. "specific leavening ratios" is just silly. Yes, baking power and/or soda are needed in a lot of baking and you need to add enough and not too much. It isn't, however, and unforgiving ratio. A few grams more or less won't make a difference that anyone would care about. Yes, the boxed recipe has been specifically tweaked to be as foolproof and forgiving as possible. Further, there's definitely times where ingredients are added simply because it gives just a slight benefit to the outcome. But it's not as if you can't get close if not better with a from scratch recipe depending on what you are making. Angel food cake, for example, is far better when done from scratch. So are a few cakes like texas sheet cake and arguably brownies (that one is a holy war). |
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| ▲ | Dylan16807 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Nothing in this comment suggests anything bad about them, just that you can do it a different way. If that's the reason to dismiss them, that's a very shallow reason. | | |
| ▲ | cogman10 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | That's not the claim I'm refuting, this is > 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. My point was that these added ingredients aren't special space magic, they all have a purpose and that purpose is something home bakers can often replicate with simple ingredients. I'm refuting the notion that it's impossible to best the box because of the exotic ingredients. I make no claim as to whether box vs common ingredients are better/healthier/etc. They are what they are. | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 a day ago | parent [-] | | Okay, that's fair then. But I wish you would have replied to the comment making that claim. Not one by a different person making a different point. | | |
| ▲ | cogman10 a day ago | parent [-] | | The comment I replied to stated > That person listed a lot of completely different ingredients. Did you dismiss them all out of hand for a specific reason? I gave the specific reason to dismiss those ingredients. I took the two comments together trying to say that the boxed goods do things impossible for a home baker. I apologize if the intent of my comment wasn't clear. | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 a day ago | parent [-] | | I'm confused. So you are dismissing them? Then I do disagree with you. Dismissing the ingredients needs an actual reason they're bad, not just a way to replace them. If you were only saying it's possible to replace them with simple ingredients, that would not be a dismissal of the ingredients themselves. > I took the two comments together trying to say that the boxed goods do things impossible for a home baker. I don't think so. bruce511 was replying to a completely different part of the ancestor comment, disliking the list of chemicals regardless of whether they do something unique, and tavavex was rebutting a dislike of chemicals. | | |
| ▲ | cogman10 a day ago | parent [-] | | > Then I do disagree with you. Dismissing the ingredients needs an actual reason they're bad, not just a way to replace them. > If you were only saying it's possible to replace them with simple ingredients, that would not be a dismissal of the ingredients themselves. I don't understand what you mean by "dismissal". When I'm "dismissing" them it is in the context of "you don't need these to make delicious cakes competitive with the box goods." And the reason I'm dismissing is because of availability to a home cook. It's fair to point out the parent comment was talking about the fear of chemicals in the foods, not a concern I share. I was more writing in terms of whether or not you actually need these ingredients to be successful baking. I'd further say that, especially with food, there's no strict "bad/good". The ingredients are simply different. While it does impact the final outcome, you likely won't taste much difference if you used canola oil or corn oil in a recipe, for example. Does that make corn or canola bad/good? No, they are just different ingredients that accomplish the same goal. With that in mind, availability becomes a much more important thing to consider. So I can dismiss the need for xanthan gum for a home cook because I know that potato starch will fill the same role while being easy to find in the store. It's more available, not better. |
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| ▲ | komali2 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's cheaper and nicer to buy from simple graineries than from some faceless megacorp that's probably just Nestle, that's shrinking your boxes and not telling you as if you're a moron and can't tell. Also the powdered fats lack the flavor that wet ones do. | | |
| ▲ | sfn42 a day ago | parent [-] | | In Norway these products usually don't have powdered fats. They will typically require that you add egg(s) and butter/margarin, maybe milk etc. Here's the ingredient list for Toro Brownies, translated by me. Sugar, wheat flour, reduced-fat cocoa, baking powder(calcium phosphate, sodium carbonate), coffee, salt, vanillin I'm not sure about the fat reduced cocoa, for all I know that might just be what I think of as normal cocoa powder, and the rest are just regular ingredients anyone would use. No fancy surfactants and powdered fats etc. | | |
| ▲ | account42 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | But then there is even less point in buying the branded mix rather than individual ingredients that you can use for various recipes with ratios that you like. | | |
| ▲ | sfn42 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | The point is that I can make brownies, rolls, whatever I please without having a cupboard full of all kinds of crap like flour, sugar, cocoa etc that attracts bugs and expires and so on. I buy one bag that's dirt cheap and has everything I need including instructions. And it just has the same stuff I would be using anyway so there's no downside. No scary ingredients. Just freshly baked goods on demand. |
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