I was permanently banned from the Reddit sub without recourse for posting this despite not breaking any rules. I’m slowly making the migration over thanks to such encouragement.
I was permanently banned from the Reddit sub without recourse for posting this despite not breaking any rules. I’m slowly making the migration over thanks to such encouragement.
It’s a blend of honey and high fructose corn syrup, what in the ever living fuck is high fructose corn syrup doing in honey? Oh, making more profits by cutting it.
Death to high fructose corn syrup
I can see it being useful if you’re making candy. Different sugars crystallize differently, so it’s not uncommon to mix corn syrup and sugar to get the right ratio.
But they’re also making “pancake syrup” that is corn syrup dyed and flavored to approximate maple syrup which is a crime against nature.
If you’re mixing things up in the kitchen, typically you try to be somewhat precise with ratios.
The difference in this case being that because the actual ratio of the blend is unknown, you don’t actually know how it would crystallize. Technically they could even change up the ratio week to week based on the price of high-fructose corn syrup so you wouldn’t even get consistency from it.
Hmm. I was a professional chef for ~15 years and your right and wrong at the same time
Baking is precise. Bakers are wholly different kinds of people compared to those on a line. Baking is exact amounts, humidity percentages, controlled environments. Cooking is eyeballing everything and adjusting by taste.
I make recipe by ratio. Sometimes, a lot of the times, the ratio isn’t even conscious, I just know it needs more of this and this to get the taste and textures I want.
So yes; ratios. But no; no measuring. A cup is about a handful. If you got the spatial chops that should be just about all you need to make everything in the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) manual, which, if you’re gonna buy a cook book, just bite the bullet and spend the $100 on it
Yes but no. Humidity and environment will change how the bread turns out, but even in large industrial bakeries where they chemically analyse the flour and have influence over microbiomes they know that the slightest, uncontrollable, variation can throw things off so you still have people listening to how the dough sounds in the kneader, how sproingy it is after proofing, and make calls about whether the dough needs some more or less work or time.
It might be possible to fully automate things by killing the flour (by default it contains lots of microorganisms), use yeast only (while you can get pure-strain sourdough it’s still a more fickle beast than straight yeast), but then you probably need to be American to still call the final product bread.
By contrast if you’re a baker’s apprentice in Germany for the first year you’ll be forbidden to touch the kneader, you need to have heard lots of doughs and observed many a decision the master makes on the fly about what exactly to do to the dough and why until you have the necessary intuition to start making calls on your own. The first thing you learn is dough tension and how to knead two loaves at the same time, messing up there is not a biggie you just gotta have to start over. Not exactly German but here’s a good video about dough tension. It’s important for every elastic dough and baguettes are particularly finicky so it’s a good example.
I think the reason you hear the “baking is a science” trope: People can’t actually bake. Sure, using exact amounts will get you a better result if you don’t know anything about dough but once you do you’ll be adjusting things on the fly to account for things like initial water content in the flour and the phase of the moon. Baking is alchemy.
Even brands like log cabin who claim to use “no high fructose corn syrup” are just corn syrup and sugar. There are people who go their entire lives eating pancake syrup and table syrup on their pancakes, and die never having tasted actual maple syrup.
Nobody making candy would every use this pre-blended product; they’d want to combine the two different sugars themselves so they could control the ratio.
Yeah, I was commenting on the notion of mixing honey with corn syrup generally, not this shit.
Though I’m sure there’s a bunch of old ladies in Texas who have recipes on old, yellowed card stock that call for this.
Isn’t that what the cheap syrup has always been? IHOP basically built their whole company on it.
Hot take, but it’s not a bad technology. It’s just heavily overused because US farm subsidies.
Eh, too much fructose and your body stops processing it. Fructose doesn’t actually trigger your body to use it, and if you don’t have enough other sugars present, it causes problems. Not an issue in moderation, but high-fructose syrup is used in so many things that it’s a real concern.
TIL. It sounds like there’s some debate about the severity of that, from what I can see, but it is a thing.
Yeah, just about any diet will have enough other carbs to work, but if all you eat is white bread and pepsi, that will be another issue with your diet.