I looked for the recipe this comment was made in, and in the comments, the original author of the recipe mentions replacing whole or part of the oil with applesauce which might explain why.
Yep. Applesauce can be used as a replacement for oil in cakes and some quick breads. I’ve done it on the rare occasion I’ve been short of cooking oil for a cake. Don’t think I’ve ever swapped it in for all the oil though. It does give a bit different texture and flavor, I find it kind of pleasant myself. And youy will need to probably bake the cake for a bit longer too. YMMV based on your oven.
I personally would not use applesauce to fry in though. But perhaps Flying Squid’s mother should experiment for use and they can report back to us on the results.
It’s better as a replacement for eggs. I say this as a avid vegan baker, oil is oil. Results may vary, but there is no good substitute. And coconut oil is the best kind, IMHO. Worth the extra couple bucks.
I did not want to accidentally send more comments to the person in the screenshots way by posting a link. It was a recipe for brownies. Here is the comment made by the author:
Baking is a science, not an art. You want cooking for that. You can’t just randomly switch shit and expect it to work. If you must substitute, do some research first and expect to have to fiddle with stuff to get things to come out tolerable.
Applesauce is considered a substitute of oil when baking. There was a time that applesauce was cheaper and easier to come by than cooking oils. It’s been done for a very long time.
Baking is as much of an art as cooking is. It is just much less complacent with mistakes.
As soon as you get the notion of what to mix to achieve a given result, or which technique produces another, you can start throwing things together and see what comes out.
I burned, fumbled and messed up my share of cooking/baking and I regret nothing.
also much more punishing if you do make a mistake. Oh you added too much flour and the consistency is wrong? Well now you gotta add a whole new egg and a bit of everything :)
You just wanted a small test batch. Guess what? That extra pinch of anything now requires you to add an obscene amount of everything else to rebalance the thing.
Congratulations! You now have enough to feed the entire block, twice.
I know it’s not baking baking, but that’s how I ended up with too many crepes recently. The recepie I was using gave me a consistency of pancake batter instead of much more fluid crepe batter, so I added more milk, oh haha a bit too much milk, bit more flour, mmm close, bit more milk, ah perfect. And then I had crepes for breakfast and lunch for 3 days in a row, squeezed in some blasphemy crepe burritors for dinner as well. Not that I’m complaining that much, but the plan was just lunch crepes and a bit left-over for breakfast the next day lol
Yeah bread is an art, much like sculpture. You gotta learn to feel the dough and the air to understand what size of a scoche you need to give it and of what.
You can replace SOME of the oil with applesauce. But replacing all of it (which I did find on some really shitty websites) will not work correctly.
Fat soluble flavors will be diluted by the excess water as well as not giving flour anything to bond to. Less flavor, rock hard baked good.
If you want to try using applesauce, use unsweetened applesauce and only replace (at max) 50% of the oil required for the recipe. Results may vary, I don’t see the use in lowering the fat content of a delicious baked good. I’m eating that shit full flavor, full fat, full sugar. Just eat less of it.
Outside of that tangent, the gall of this person to say “I followed the recipe exactly” when their very first sentence contradicts that completely.
I’ve been replacing eggs with applesauce when making muffins for the past 15 years, and I love it. My friend is allergic to eggs, so he is able to eat them too!
It isn’t crazy that the poster did the substitution, it’s is common way to replace some ingredients. She just didn’t execute properly and blamed the recipe maker/poster instead of being self-aware.
Good on you for going the extra mile for your friend!
Full fat, yes, but not full sugar. We cut the sugar to like 1/3 in most recipes and it usually comes out great. Most recipes I’ve seen use way too much sugar.
Fat is way more filling than carbs for the same amount of calories, so don’t shy away from the fat. If you load up on fat and fiber, you’ll feel more satisfied on less calories, so you’re much less likely to sneak a taste of that sugary treat and totally reverse all the good you’ve been trying to do with reducing calories.
They are replacing some of the sugar with it, not the fat. I’m a fan of both normal and the applesauce variants, but you need to understand the science behind the normal ingredients before you swap them out for others. Baking is science.
Actually we replace eggs with it. You can also use a banana or something called a flaxseed egg, which is simply one part flaxseed and three parts water. Let it sit for ten minutes.
This is the correct answer. My SO baked a lot and has used all of these. However, most of the recipes she’s baked recently have been fully vegan recipes right off the get-go, so they didn’t require egg substitues iirc.
Bianca Zapatka has a whole website dedicated to amazing vegan cooking and baking recipes - anyone interested in that should give them a shot:
Apple Sauce is a mixture of pulp and water, what little fatty acids are available are tied up, so it does not function as an oil substitute. Oil and Water have completely different properties.
Dude, ages ago when I did tech support. A simple question like: “are the lights on your modem on?” was met with a yes. Then after an hour of troubleshooting you find out, in fact, no they weren’t on the entire time and the modem was unplugged. Like, you lied, you never even checked. The real questions then become: why was the modem unplugged? Who unplugged it? What reason does one have for unplugging their modem?
And this is exactly why I always humour tech support when they’re asking me which lights exactly are on, which colour, and their blinking patterns. I’ve already made the diagnosis yes the problem is on their end but it’s not like they have a way to know I’m not full of shit.
Yup. Many people have a tendency to tell someone what they think they want to hear. “Is the light on?” hmmm I think they want me to say yes so… “yes”.
So you always have to make an effort to ask questions in a way that gives no indication of what the “correct” answer should be. Don’t ask “is the value in that field set to xyz”? Instead ask “what is the value you see in that field?”
I know someone who, when it’s having a panic attack and is asked a question, it asks the person asking what the correct answer is. Even if they have no way of knowing.
some people are so very afraid of being anything but perfect they will just lie about things and insist you’re not doing enough to fix a problem with your service
I just want to say, as someone who is quite tech literate, these kinds of questions are incredibly annoying to get through. I called my ISP, and they tried walking me through restarting my router when I could ping their gateway already, but not the outside world (e.g. 1.1.1.1).
But then again, I’ve worked tech support and have been on the other end with tech illiterate people, so I get it.
Oh man that would be amazing. My ISP at some point stopped giving out modems with the internet contract and instead only offers these shitty routers with integrated modems. I read somewhere that you can still get a modem if you asked. So I called and spend 15 minutes trying to describe the difference between a router and a modem and gave up.
When I had DSL, I bought my own modem and connected it to the same router I used at a previous place. They when to charge ~$10/month, so I spent about $20 and got a basic modem.
My current internet is Ethernet at the wall, so no need for a modem, and AFAIK the company doesn’t even provide routers (didn’t ask, I just used the one I had). All I needed was the gateway, netmask, and our static (CGNATed) IP. They wrote that in a piece of paper, which I keep in my safe so I don’t need to call them just because I reset my router or something.
I think they know who I am by now because I call pretty much every time the Internet goes out. It’s a small company (only serves my town of 30-40k people), and I’m probably the only one with a ln enterprise-y router (Mikrotik) with a separate AP (Ubiquiti). Yet I still need to do the basic troubleshooting before they’ll actually look into the traffic on their end.
I would like to just buy a modem but somehow I can’t find any cable modems in Germany. There are a few I could import from Amazon US but they apparently don’t support EuroDOCSIS. I used to have one from Cisco, provided by the ISP, that worked perfectly but with a contract change they demanded it back (a condition they did not tell me about and I’m still angry about that).
Yeah. You would have had to triangulate your way around to getting the information that is exactly the information that you knew already that it was.
"Sir, I need you to go to the oil that you used and check if it is non-hydrogenated or hydrogenated. It should be printed on the back of the label."
"What do you mean, I never had this problem before"
"Yes, I'm aware, they have changed the oil constitution recently. I'll be able to resolve this problem for you, I just need to know if the oil is hydrogenated or not."
"I don't see what that has to do with anything"
"Can you just check the back of the bottle, please? Then I'm sure we'll be able to get your recipe working again"
"Okay, well I didn't actually use oil, I used toothpaste because it was expired and I wanted to get rid of it"
"Aha! Okay, I understand sir. I'm glad we were able to get to the bottom of the issue you're having. So, if you make the recipe with toothpaste, it definitely won't taste the same or have a good consistency. I think if you switch back to using oil you'll find that the pancakes still taste the same as they used to"
"But I think I should be able to use toothpaste."
"Absolutely. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"
Oh, you already rebooted? Okay, well maybe your power cable is loose. Go ahead and shut down for me real quick, so you can unplug that power cable and plug it back in. Great, now that you’ve power cycled your computer, the problem is fixed? Glad I could help.
I’m the last stop for my help desk and I legit feel like Dr House some days.
Yeah. Users lie. They also misremember or straight up don’t notice.
To be fair tho, some of L1 can’t write for shit, and some of L1 likes going well beyond the scope of the KB and breaks more stuff in the process. Those guys usually make good L2 since they are proactive and accept feedback, they just lack discretion.
I used to work in a 3rd line tech support. Whenever we got escalations from tier 2 I’d read their notes and then start from the beginning. More often than not they would say they have checked something and not found the fault when indeed that was the fault.
Click the start button. The start button. It’s on the bottom left. Yes, click it. You already clicked it? Don’t click it again! You clicked it again? Okay, click it again. Now on the fly out click control panel. Wait, you clicked the start button again? Okay click it again. You know what? Fuck this shit, I quit.
Me: Please close all windows you have currently opened. Costumer: Ok, one moment. leaves phone, comes back 2 minutes later. Me: It will take quite long if you are not sitting in front of your computer, can you relocate there? Costumer: I am in front of the computer, i just closed all windows just like you told me. Me: dies internally
I had another client with ADSL, asked them what modem they used: Client: “My modem is colorful and full of lights!”
seriously, tech support is funny shit if it doesn’t happen to you.
I used to work in tech support for a pharmacy chain.
One day I ask the pharmacist to unplug for 10 seconds. He tells me he doesn’t know how to count to 10, just 30. Sometimes he has to count to 60, or 90, or even 180…but he doesn’t. He just counts to 30 until it looks good.
In the US, most retail pharmacists do little compounding. They mostly check for drug interactions (since most prescribers don’t talk to each other unless you’re a patient of a holistic care team) and make sure the techs and the software don’t screw up.
The joke is that most pills are dispensed in multiples of 30.
I remember one call where the customer didn’t know where the Start button was. I told them that it was the button on the lower left-hand corner of the screen. She said that she clicked it and everything went black. Turns out she hit the power button on her monitor.
After you click it, the Start Menu will appear. While the Start Menu is showing, there are some icons all the way to the left, and one of them is called Control Panel. Oh, you pushed the power button and it’s off now? Okay… Push the power button to turn the computer back on. You already did? You pushed it again and it powered off? Turn the computer back on please.
You say this, but then I used to read r/justrolledintotheshop. People outright fail at substituting engine oil for engine oil from time to time. The kind of person that would try applesauce probably wouldn’t be doing more self harm than otherwise.
(Fun fact: putting gasoline in a diesel engine is way worse than putting diesel in a gas engine. In the latter case, it won’t run until you replace the fuel with the correct stuff. In the former case, it pretty quickly destroys the engine.)
Thanks for letting me know, 8 didn’t actually know that. I don’t think I’ll ever own a Diesel vehicle but I’ll keep it in mind that it’s not so simple as emptying the tank lol
Yeah, the fuel injection on modem diesels requires very high pressure and the pumps that form that pressure rewire very tight tolerances/clearances and rely on the fuel as lubricant. Without it, they grind themselves up, ruining both themselves and the injectors downstream with a shower of metal particles.
The entire fuel system has to be replaced.
I think it depends, I’ve known of someone doing it in an old wreck years ago, and after refilling with the correct fuel it ran as well as it did before (which is to say it smoked and sounded like a bag of spanners). No idea how much it may have shortened what life it had left, but it wasn’t instant death.
In the defence of this person, some recipes for desserts offer applesauce as a replacement for oil as a healthier option, like the mug cake I made literally 20 mins ago. This might be one of those
Add comment