There have been a few food-related news stories over the past week that caught my attention. Last Wednesday, my friend Dorothy emailed me and asked if I had read the article about White Lily flour in the New York Times food section that morning. I immediately went to the New York Times website and read that J.M. Smucker, who purchased White Lily last year, is closing down their Knoxville plant where the flour has been milled since 1883 and moving production to two plants in the midwest. Normally, I wouldn't care if a food manufacturer moved their production facility, but the article describes how in a blind test, two bakers could easily distinguish between the original Knoxville White Lily flour and that milled at one of the midwest factories -- both on sight and in a finished baked product -- with the latter being decidedly inferior.
Sigh. I've baked almost exclusively with White Lily for the at least the past five years, ever since I discovered that they carried it at my local Harris Teeter supermarket. White Lily is less dense than other all-purpose flours. As a result, a five-pound bag of White Lily is visibly larger than a five-pound bag of any other brand. Because of this characteristic, you have to make adjustments when using White Lily in a recipe not specifically written for the brand. For every cup of flour required in the recipe, you can have use an extra two tablespoons of White Lily to end up with the same weight of flour that you would get using a cup of another brand. Since I use White Lily so much, I automatically do this calculation in my head whenever I bake anything. Sometimes it gets a little tricky -- like with the Buttercake marble cake I made recently. Since the recipe calls for 2 and 2/3 cup of flour, it required 2 and 2/3 cup + 1/4 cup + 4 teaspoons of White Lily.
Last week I also caught a piece on the Today Show discussing the grocery store shrink ray, or how manufacturers are decreasing packaging sizes while maintaining the same prices, effectively instituting sneaky price increases:
The piece showed the Hershey's Special Dark giant size bar as an example of a food that has been downsized. This explained my repeated inability to buy 8 ounce Hershey's Special Dark bars over the past few weeks. I loved using the 8 ounce bar because it was cheap (at Target they were priced at $1.82, but regularly offered on sale for $1.25), but more importantly because the bars were scored into 16 squares, so no weighing was required. I just broke off two squares of chocolate for each ounce of chocolate required in a recipe. Now I can only find 6.8 ounce bars, which Target sells for $1.62. It's a minimal price increase per ounce but infinitely more annoying since I now have to weigh out the chocolate and I always end up with some odd amount left over since the bar contains a fractional part of an ounce.
Anyway, I think this confirms my general notion that everything good gets ruined in the end. I am brand loyal to a fault. But it just makes the heartbreak all the worse when my favorite brands reformulate. It's been over a year since Kiss My Face reformulated the peaches and creme moisturizer that I had been using every day for ten years. The old formula was creamy and smelled like a real fresh peach -- as a friend of mine commented, you could actually smell the fuzz! Now the stuff won't absorb and not only no longer smells like peaches, it stinks. Literally. It appears that my repeated distraught emails to the company aren't going to be enough to bring the original formula back.
Just so this post isn't a total downer, I do have to say that I really enjoyed a very funny article on slate.com about Nutraloaf, a dish served to prisoners with disciplinary problems. "The loaf," as it's sometimes called, delivers an entire day's nutritional requirements and is meant to be eaten without utensils. Writer Arin Greenwood recreated several versions of the dish at home to investigate whether it really is so bad that it violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Stomach turning and hilarious at the same time!
Sigh. I've baked almost exclusively with White Lily for the at least the past five years, ever since I discovered that they carried it at my local Harris Teeter supermarket. White Lily is less dense than other all-purpose flours. As a result, a five-pound bag of White Lily is visibly larger than a five-pound bag of any other brand. Because of this characteristic, you have to make adjustments when using White Lily in a recipe not specifically written for the brand. For every cup of flour required in the recipe, you can have use an extra two tablespoons of White Lily to end up with the same weight of flour that you would get using a cup of another brand. Since I use White Lily so much, I automatically do this calculation in my head whenever I bake anything. Sometimes it gets a little tricky -- like with the Buttercake marble cake I made recently. Since the recipe calls for 2 and 2/3 cup of flour, it required 2 and 2/3 cup + 1/4 cup + 4 teaspoons of White Lily.
Last week I also caught a piece on the Today Show discussing the grocery store shrink ray, or how manufacturers are decreasing packaging sizes while maintaining the same prices, effectively instituting sneaky price increases:
The piece showed the Hershey's Special Dark giant size bar as an example of a food that has been downsized. This explained my repeated inability to buy 8 ounce Hershey's Special Dark bars over the past few weeks. I loved using the 8 ounce bar because it was cheap (at Target they were priced at $1.82, but regularly offered on sale for $1.25), but more importantly because the bars were scored into 16 squares, so no weighing was required. I just broke off two squares of chocolate for each ounce of chocolate required in a recipe. Now I can only find 6.8 ounce bars, which Target sells for $1.62. It's a minimal price increase per ounce but infinitely more annoying since I now have to weigh out the chocolate and I always end up with some odd amount left over since the bar contains a fractional part of an ounce.
Anyway, I think this confirms my general notion that everything good gets ruined in the end. I am brand loyal to a fault. But it just makes the heartbreak all the worse when my favorite brands reformulate. It's been over a year since Kiss My Face reformulated the peaches and creme moisturizer that I had been using every day for ten years. The old formula was creamy and smelled like a real fresh peach -- as a friend of mine commented, you could actually smell the fuzz! Now the stuff won't absorb and not only no longer smells like peaches, it stinks. Literally. It appears that my repeated distraught emails to the company aren't going to be enough to bring the original formula back.
Just so this post isn't a total downer, I do have to say that I really enjoyed a very funny article on slate.com about Nutraloaf, a dish served to prisoners with disciplinary problems. "The loaf," as it's sometimes called, delivers an entire day's nutritional requirements and is meant to be eaten without utensils. Writer Arin Greenwood recreated several versions of the dish at home to investigate whether it really is so bad that it violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Stomach turning and hilarious at the same time!
Comments
Don't even get me started on discontinuing good products (Trader Joe's, I'm still mad about the raspberry applesauce!)