A south-up map article that doesn't mention the classic (pre-internet even) Theory of Continental Drip? (basically that you can overlay "teardrop" shapes on south america, africa, mexico, and a bunch of other places depending on how artistic you get about it; though there were apparently later attempts to tie it to actual plate tectonics, it was originally a simple visual pun...)
According to some (youtube) experiments, commercial brownie mix produces some aspects of brownies more consistently because it's ground finer (and mixed more uniformly) than the ingredients you can usually source. So it's not quite that simple (though it mostly is.)
I very strongly suspect that this preference is learned. I've never made anything from a mix, but I've baked brownies, cookies, sponge, tarts, biscuits and bread. They have all turned out perfectly delicious, without any need for the addition of whatever emulsifiers and what-not you'll find in the premixed packets.
This isn't to say that there's necessarily anything wrong with those ingredients. I'm sure that they're perfectly safe to eat, but they are simply not required. This seems to be a peculiarly American thing, permitting a large corporation to insert itself in the supply chain without there being any need whatsoever for them to be there.
In the rest of the world, where most of us live, there seems to be almost no examples of cake "recipes" containing anything other than basic ingredients. I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix". I can hardly even imagine such a recipe existing. It boggles my mind.
I've never made anything from a mix, but I've baked brownies, cookies,
sponge, tarts, biscuits and bread. They have all turned out perfectly
delicious, without any need for the addition of whatever emulsifiers
and what-not you'll find in the premixed packets.
Without having tried the alternative that's a pretty weak claim.
> I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix".
You don’t see that recipe because the only place most people see it is on the back of the box of brownie mix.
My family has predominantly made boxed mixes my whole life (though I think my grandma often made cakes from scratch). However, I haven’t seen people in my family use cake mixes in other recipes other than what is on the box.
The one exception might be a cookie recipe my grandma had that used jell-o mix, I think. But it also may have been generic gelatin, as they were chocolate chip cookies, there was no fruity jell-o flavor at all.
You’re right that people like what they’re used to. If you’ve only ever had cake from scratch, it’s going to be good, it’s still cake. The ones I’ve had, they are a little more dense and dry, while the boxed mixed have tended to be more moist and airy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpF5B_jHZrw (Adam Ragusea, "How to give brownies a smooth, glossy top") which is where I remembered this from turns out to have been primarily about the appearance of the top - as part of his series of "change two dozen variables one at a time to quantify them properly" baking series (the chocolate chip cookie one is one of the other classics of the form.) (Though I may have it confused with one his other videos since he spends more time on dissolving sugar than boxed mixes here...)
it's not.
cake flour is simply lower-gluten flour. ther's not a big difference between that and "AP" flour, but a big difference between it and bread or "strong" (high-gluten) flour.
The archive has info-cpm mailing list content as well as code; a surprising amount of the mailing list traffic is complaining about the mailing list, if you thought that sort of thing had changed in the last 40 years. (The archive itself is "a little before my [online] time" but I recognized names like Jerry Pournelle, Lauren Weinstein, Bandy, and James Gosling...)
Hmm, is coffee a problem? (some of the extraction depends on temperature, but if water boils before reaching that temperature then the extraction wouldn't work...)
One can compensate with (steam)pressure and/or duration. Or cold brewing.
In practice I note not that much difference at about 2500m altitute, where my main residence is. French/Aeropress suffices. 100°C isn't necessary. Even only 90°C suffices.
Similar for good Tea. You destroy that with 100°C. Very good Tea should be brewed at 60 to 70°C for greens, blacks more like 70 to 85. Though the hardness/pH of the used water is equally important for them. For coffee not so much.
Coffee takes compensation, but even ambient pressure extraction can be tuned for great results — Denver and Boulder have good coffee scenes, for example. The bigger challenge is that Mr Coffee style brewers (bubble pump) have no way to adjust extraction time; and some fancier brewers try to closed-loop control temperature, and end up boiling the water continuously while brewing. Pour-overs obviously give you control to succeed, but for traditional machines I’ve found it critical to find one that allows a set point temperature JUST below local boiling, as well as time adjustment. The Breville Precision is my current workhorse, although I have some mixed feelings about it.
Espresso machines work at high pressures (8-9 bar) so it's less of an issue with those. I went up to the observatory on Mont Blanc a few years ago and had an espresso there. That's 3500 meter. I definitely was out of breath. The coffee was fine.
Yes! I like to vacation in the summer at Mammoth Lakes (~8000 ft ~2400m) and coffee is a bit of a problem. I like weak coffee and compensate for altitude by adding more grounds, but it's really not the same.
Which is kind of funny as they where storing energy from a hydroelectric power plant, so building a larger dam would have been way more energy efficient.
Than 1024 SPARC cores? ... actually, looks like phones beat the 130 GFLOPS score mentioned on wikipedia at least 5 years back, so it looks like yeah, even if your problem is widely parallel a modern high end phone will still do better. Woah.
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