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Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003

You 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.

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That's just not really true though. There are other ingredients in box mixes, such as conditioners and other incremental improvements grandma doesn't have a container of on her counter. You certainly have more control over the final product if you mix everything from scratch, but these mixes are popular for a reason; they make good cake without having to reinvent decades of kitchen science and allow bakers to focus on stuff that matters instead of dick-measuring about who can sift and measure flour the best.

The amount of people in the cooking enthusiast world that dismiss chemistry and assume it makes the end product worse is just a socially acceptable form of ludditeism. Meanwhile in the professional world Sysco does 80 billion dollars of business.

Yeah, there's a pervasive and strange focus on purity in cooking, for whatever definition satisfies that term. All food is the result of a sequence of chemical and physical reactions; understanding those reactions might take away some of the magic but also allows you to systemically and precisely hone the outcome. I think some people resent that the magic can be explained and improved.

And it's not as if boxed cake mix is better or that the properties of commercial cake mix can't be known and used in your own from scratch baking but it's so frustrating when people are just like, "just make recipe without all the chemistry and it will be better" as if any deviation from what they consider natural is automatically worse or that those "weird" ingredients are in there for no reason other than to give you cancer or something.

A fun example from history is that currants used to be used for making all flavors of jams because they're high in pectin and would look at modern chefs funny for using this unnatural white chemical.

For the competing view, a lot of the chemistry involved in food is to maximise shelf life, with the cost to health or taste considered acceptable given the improved economics to the supplier.

Is Sysco a name that you associate with good food? In my mind they mostly supply chain restaurants and prisons.

"Good" and "high quality" for however you define them are different goals. Sysco does a fantastic job of meeting the need for "good enough food at ridiculous scale". Does Sysco meet the need of like, Michelin quality food at ridiculous scale? No, but if it were possible, they'd probably be the ones doing it.

Yeah, no. I definitely noticed when the kitchen manager was fired and they started serving reheated Sysco food instead. It’s not good at all.

There's such a high amount of snobbery (with a sizable pinch of classism) in the comments on this post. Ick.

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