In the 70s, Shake 'N Bake had a line of advertisements featuring a butcher named Pete The Butcher [...] In 1981 one of his ads included Ann B. Davis, who played Alice the housekeeper on The Brady Bunch. The ad copy includes the catchphrases, "Gotta be crispy, gotta be golden, gotta be juicy", and, "You just shake then bake, and that chicken's so crisp and juicy and golden it makes me look golden, if you know what I mean".
Ma'am, I don't. Don't know what you mean
you gotta understand the previous decades weren't necessarily less weird than today, it was just weird in a way totally inscrutable and off-putting to us.
Busts in suddenly, yelling
HEY EVERYBODY DID THE NEWS GET AROUND -
i dunno, ig I assumed there was like some food science shit going on so you could get something kinda fried/crispy out of something you put in an oven
but there's not. it's literally just breadcrumbs doped in vegetable oil. you can make it yourself in about 30 seconds for a tiny fraction of the money, and it comes out better than the stuff in the box
oh ok yeah I mean I like to bake chicken that way (simple and tasty!) so shake and bake is not something I've ever actually bothered to use (and I find the protein in an egg tends to be better for getting the breading to adhere)
okay i don't like shake and bake, i think it tastes gross and i prefer to make my own dredges, but i don't get the money angle. a box is like four dollars. what could you use to achieve the same thing for less?
You gotta think in volume. A box of shake and bake is two little 2.5oz packets, and runs over 5 bucks in my neck of the woods.
Meanwhile a 1lb can of even name brand breadcrumbs is 3 bucks. Or if you wanna get fancy, panko comes in 8oz boxes for 2.50, which is about the same volume anyway because panko is less dense than regular breadcrumbs.
So for half the price, I get enough bread crumbs for 3-6 batches, and all I gotta do is just melt in a tablespoon or two of butter. Cause that's literally all you're paying for: for Kraft to toast some crumbs for you. They don't even come with the plastic bag for shaking anymore.
ah, i guess i would have to imagine cooking fried chicken frequently enough to not have the stuff expire before I can use it all. i bread something like... once a month, tops. shake and bake is $5 for two meals, and the breadcrumbs are $3 and I'll get two meals out of them before I have to throw them out, so it's a two dollar difference in my head. I get what you mean though.
I do a lot of air fryer cooking, so fried chicken or pork chops are a pretty regular part of my rotation, and breadcrumbs last pretty much forever since they're already stale. I'd tried a bunch of different breading techniques but most were just too much work to do all the time, until I remembered shake'n'bake, went to buy some, saw the price, and started digging for recipes instead.
