Boxed cake vs scratch cake — Why bakers can't beat SCIENCE

this video is sponsored by Skillshare boxed cake mixes have characteristics that we simply cannot recreate here in the home kitchen using conventional ingredients why is that the case and how does it affect the finished baked results well we're going to do an experiment where we bake the same cake two ways we're going to talk to a scientist about the surprisingly sophisticated contents of this box and we'll interrogate the philosophical questions raised by all of this including what's the point of making anything from scratch field trip to the Mill Hill Community Arts Center in Macon Georgia where the Mill Hill bakers collective is run by my friend Adriana Horton it's a low-cost shared kitchen space for indie bakers who have their own respective businesses Adriana's business is the oh honey baking company and she makes my favorite cake which is a cookies and cream cake first she's gonna make it from her favorite box mix one chocolate and one vanilla to make an Oreo cake Duncan is my main squeeze it's just the most consistent and it tastes like chemicals you just mix in some eggs water and oil but this whipping stage which the instructions tell you to do is absolutely key especially for boxed mixes that's according to dr. Rebecca Miller Regan a professor of bakery science at Kansas State University in order to get a cake to rise and to have a nice crumb grain it's critical to get air into that batter during mixing that's the only place it comes from a lot of people think that the chemical leavening like your baking powder or baking soda makes the air bubbles it doesn't dr. Miller says this chemical reaction merely makes co2 which inflates existing air bubbles when you bake a cake from scratch there's often a stage called creaming where you beat solid fat to create air bubbles within it but with a box the solid fat shortening in this case is already mixed in there so there can be no creaming stage the contents of this box have been formulated to be whipped in their entirety without going tough the way that potentially a cake batter that you made from could go tough if you over mix it if your box cakes aren't coming out well dr. Miller suspects it's because you're not following the instructions that tell you to beat the batter for a good two minutes after you get everything incorporated continued mixing it breaks the bubbles that are incorporated into smaller sized bubbles so you get more bubbles that are smaller in size that make a nice fine uniform green in your final cake and these are the mixed cakes and you can really see the difference because the mixed cakes are so smooth and perfect and the scratch cakes have bubbles and more like a crust and cracks on top of them but how do they taste after we get them all decorated well you can see how soft the box cake is and it tastes very sweet too sweet to my taste here's the scratch cake it's not as fluffy but it has more of a body to it I would go so far as to call the chocolate version of Adriana's scratch cake clearly superior to the chocolate box cake it's just fuzzier richer more substantial but the softness of the white cake from the mix is just like incomparable box cake is very sweet but the soft consistency is definitely a win for science because you can't recreate that with a scratch cake at all it's just impossible and why can't you well dr. Miller says it comes down to three big factors the emulsifiers that are in this box there's the fats that are in this box and specifically how they're integrated into the rest of the mixture and then there's the kind of flour we'll start with the first thing the emulsifiers an emulsifier is any ingredient that allows two or more liquids to mix together and stay mixed together even if they don't want to the big example would be oil and water they kind of reject each other on a chemical level I can smush them together with brute force but this mixture is unstable the water in fat will eventually separate now if I mix in an egg yolk I can get a smooth and stable emulsion egg yolks contain lecithin a molecule that can join up with water on one end and with fat on the other and there it's the bond between the two warring camps the hi-tech emulsifiers that are in this box allowed the batter to hold on to more water and oil than it normally could that'll get you a more moist texture and crucially the emulsifiers allow the batter to hold on to more bubbles that would otherwise just pop so in your commercial cake mix it has the right type of emulsifiers that help the air to be there's gonna be trapped but it helps hold the air bubbles in the aqueous or water phase of the batter but when you I'm making it at home you don't have those specific type of and most of ours available we do have some options in here for example egg yolks that's why recipes for particularly rich and moist cakes often call for extra egg yolks it's for the emulsifiers that they have dr. Miller says you can also look for shortening that has some of these more high-tech emulsifiers in it not to advertise for Crisco but that's what we have here and it will stay on there that it has mono and diglycerides and then those are an emulsifier so it works well because that helps to stabilize and get more air whipped into the shortening phase and indeed we see mono and diglycerides mentioned right here on the Duncan Hines box there's other emulsifiers you can buy like soy lecithin but what are the odds that you're gonna come up with a better formula than all of the highly paid highly educated food scientists that they have working at ConAgra doing thousands and thousands and thousands of experiments to nail the perfect formula that gets you a perfectly reliable cake every single time science it's like magic that works now let's talk about the fats in here cakes often have a mixture of solid and liquid fats in this case the Box tells us to add our own veg oil but the solid fat the shortening is already in the Box shortening is great because it has a long shelf life it doesn't have any water it in like butter does dr. Miller says the problem with shortening is that it breaks foams the air bubbles that we're talking about but science has a solution all the dry ingredients and the short me go through this cake finisher which kind of just smears the shortening on the flour particles so if you take a cake mix and you kind of like grab a handful and squeeze it it'll kind of stick together that's why because of the shortly so that's how they get enough fat for great flavor and soft texture because it's it's done that way because if they just had free shortening then it will break the foam and you won't be able to get as much air with gin and now we come to the flower itself box cakes are typically what Baker's call high ratio cakes meaning that they actually have more sugar in them than flour because a people like sugar B because really sweet cakes tend to keep for longer and the shortening helps with that too and C really sweet cakes are stronger structurally you can build multi-layer cakes out of them without their air pockets collapsing and the bites will be less crumbly on your fork so when you have a high ratio cake which has so much sugar then the flour used for that is typically chlorine treated so what the chlorine does is it changes the properties of the starch and the flour so it oxidizes the starch and that changes how the starch is able to absorb water it can now soak up and hold a lot more water and those oxidized starches are better at holding everything together in a nice structural mesh and preventing the cake from collapsing under the weight of the sugar the water or any additional layers that you're putting on top the flour has also been milled more finely than normal flour probably through a process called pin knowing so after they make the flour they'll put it through a special little mill with pins that really break down the particle size so it's a very very fine particle size and if you kind of feel it you would give it just a little silky that again helps the flour to gel in the water and create that superior structural mesh to hold all the other ingredients now you can buy super finely milled chlorinated cake flour at the store but again an army of lab coats have specifically formulated the flour in here to work synergistically with all of the other ingredients in here what are the odds that you're going to top them and indeed even though very few will publicly admit to it some professional cake bakers do use boxed cake mixes at least as a base they might add additional things to it that's what dr. Miller does at home my Baker friend Adriana says a box cake can be a huge time-saver in a commercial context it just takes a sec to mix and it bakes faster probably because it's less dense but she says there are some styles of cake that should never be made from a box like say pound cake pound cake is supposed to exhibit the opposite of all of these traits that we get from a box it's supposed to be more dense and I love the crust that's on top and box cakes don't give you that box cakes have a very thin and kind of film on top but it is not it's not a true crust like a scratch cake but let's assume for the sake of argument that your goal is to create a cake with the characteristics of a box cake something that's light fluffy and very sweet is there any reason in that case to not bake from a box is it cheating there's a famous historical anecdote about this lots of cake mixes used to have dehydrated eggs in them all you had to do was add water then in the mid 20th century a famous psychologist and marketing expert named Ernest dictor suggested that manufacturers should try leaving out the eggs that way housewives would feel less like they were cheating there'd still be some work for them to do so that's what the manufacturers did and then sales skyrocketed at least that is the story reality is probably a little more complicated than that if you want to know more I recommend this book by food historian and journalist Laura Shapiro it's linked in the description but anyway the moral opposition to cake mixes is an example of what I would call the feeling of virtue without the substance of virtue hardship self-sacrifice these are virtuous things when we do them in a service of a cause like say someone else's well-being like if I go hungry so that my kids can have food to eat that's virtuous but what if I refrain from eating purely because I want to look a little bit better on TV this is not a hypothetical scenario I'm literally doing this right now I want more of that cake so bad it feels virtuous because virtue often involves denying yourself something that you want but for whom am i sacrificing what cause am i serving the cause is purely my own vanity and I don't think that's virtuous I mean I don't think it's a bad either it just is likewise I don't think there's any real virtue in making your own or dessert the hard way it's merely the feeling the illusion of virtue so if I want a cake with these characteristics I am baking from a box but I don't always want to cake with these characteristics in fact I really preferred Adriana's scratch version of that cookies and cream cake and yes the recipe for that cake will be my next release I'm so grateful that Adriana was willing to share her hard-earned cake skills with me and guess what there's a whole website like that full of people like that it's called Skillshare it's an online community where instructors share all kinds of creative and entrepreneurial skills that you can use to enrich or perhaps even change your life as much as I clearly believe in the value of YouTube tutorials Skillshare classes are much more than that they go way deeper they're interactive you have assignments and they're structured you're not adrift cobbling together bits from this source and that source some people learn well like that but most people learn better in a structured environment with a logical flow so you want to learn something harder than cake you want to learn how to design user experiences you know user interfaces for products you can take Marika McCluskey's intro to UX class she's one of the world's experts in this stuff so your project in this class is to conduct your own usability evaluation you get her class in thousands more Skillshare classes with your membership it's unlimited and you get two months of Skillshare premium for free by using my link in the description and after that is just $10 a month for an annual subscription it's a steal it's a new year and a new skill can bring all kinds of new things to your life sure has for mine thanks to skill share for sponsoring this video and get excited for that cake recipe I'm gonna break all your fitness resolutions

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,101,676

Rating: 4.8675499 out of 5

Keywords: cake mix, box cake mix, boxed cake mix, store bought cake mix, duncan hines, home made, how to bake a cake, how to make cake, how to bake, boxed cake mix hack, cake mix hacks, box cake, boxed cake, chocolate cake, improve store bought cake mix, boxed cake mix hacks, boxed cake mix recipes, cake baking science, baking soda science experiment, taste test, box cake mix hacks, box cake mix recipes, store bought cake mix recipes, how to bake a cake from scratch

Id: CZDFwqHkPec

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/BlueOgreBear]

I'll be honest I would never have considered using boxed cake mix. Growing up there was always this idea that it was full of oogie-boogie chemicals and home cooking was always the best way forward. Then again not only was my dad very much a traditionalist but the cake box mixes from the 80s/90s were very sweet (also wasn't everything in the 80s/90s made of neon sugar? ;) ). As a kid, we tried making little box mix fairycakes with sugarpaper faces on them (like Disney or comic characters such as the Beano) and I recall they didn't seem as good as homemade fairy cakes.

Also yay Kiss.

[u/Handiinu]

I always made my cakes from scratch

[u/sonictheplumber]

Haven't watched the video yet. But I know someone who put mayonnaise in his cake. Bet Adam didn't.

[u/not_really_here_108]

Adam’s Hattie Cake was a big hit at work and it used boxed mix.

[u/PaurAmma]

My takeaway: If flavour doesn't matter, use a box mix (oversimplifying it a bit). But my riposte to that is: Then why eat cake?