No, there is no commercial transaction here. You might say “neither is GitHub benefiting from a non-paying Iranian customer” but it is at least not 100% clear on the latter case. GitHub, as a business, benefits from non-paying users & their data.
They're tailored to your habits somehow. It's not like those videos are served to housewives who watch and search for completely different segments of reality. They'll be getting the gutworm RFK lotus seed ads.
I’d say it’s probably more common they use mixes than they create from scratch from the limited experience and talks I’ve had with bakers on the subject.
The professional part are the modifications, frosting, and decoration. Hard to beat the premade mixes for a base though.
Slightly off topic, but I’m loving comparing all these sub discussions to programming.
The issues of boxes changing and dependency management, and this thread is rough analogy to coders who just glue prepackaged stuff together or overuse of packages.
I don’t know if there’s any real takeaway but I had never thought of programming problems in this way — things always felt a bit more abstract than cooking is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Commercial cake mix is ultraprocessed,you likely won't find those ingredients in your pantry. The flour is bleached, they add emulsifiers you wouldn't find at home, the vegetable shortening is jydrogenated, etc.
If you mix it yourself, you know exactly what is in it.
This means you can vary/substitute ingredients such as heart salt for regular salt if you're on a DASH diet (half the sodium chloride is replaced with potassium chloride).
You can't swap arbitrarily but it's also not like the baking ingredients are the input to a pseudo random number generator that selects the result. You can absolutely make it more/less sweet, more/less chocolatey, more/less moist, add hints of different flavors etc.
Hopefully this'll be the end of this boxed mixes. You need to add a few ingredients to them anyway. Just add a few more and feel like a sourcerer. Your cakes will glow octarine.
