Caution with using a food scale on baked goods

Zedeff

Like many active posters I make use of a food scale for portioning my foods (and you should too!). I always buy bread from the in-store bakery at my grocery store, not from national chain bakeries, because they always look nicer, are certainly fresher, and have more interesting varieties.

I've noticed that weighing breads at home never ever agrees with the label on the breads I buy. For example:

Mini baguette: store label weight 160 grams, home scale weight 110 grams
Garlic and pepper loaf: store label 225 grams, home scale weight 140 grams
Small focaccia bread: store label 350 grams, home scale weight 250 grams

At first I assumed that the labels were wrong or I was getting ripped off. I asked the bakery department at my grocer about it and they informed me that the listed weight is the weight of the raw dough ball which loses moisture as it bakes and sits on the shelf waiting for purchase, making it lighter. Sounds fine, right?

The danger is that water has no calories, so that weight loss means that the resulting bread has more calories per gram. My mini baguette, listed at 140 calories per 70 grams? Well it actually has 204 calories per 70 grams. My focaccia has 40% more calories than listed. My garlic bread has 60% more.

If you're going to weigh your baked goods, you can't apparently log the scale weight, you have to log the relative weight of the raw ingredients. If you eat lots of bread, this could easily add 100-200 calories per day to your counts.

Weigh your breads, but calculate calories as a portion of the whole loaf when logging!