Calories in hand-sliced bread

HeidiCooksSupper

I'm probably "late coming to the party" that figured this out a long time ago but the light bulb is finally over my head.

Do you make or buy whole loaves of bread and hack them off as you want a slice? Better than guessing how many calories in a slice, just weigh the slices as you cut them and divide by the total weight of the bread.

For example, I have a heavy rye bread dough in the bowl now. I just used the old version recipe builder to list it's ingredients and know how many calories are in the whole thing. When it's baked, I'll weigh the resulting bread in grams and arbitrarily call 1g a serving and fix the recipe accordingly. I'll wait until it's baked because the loaf loses water and therefore weight as it bakes.

If a final loaf weighs 954g it will have 954 "servings" in one loaf of bread. Slice some off, weigh that, and how many grams it weighs is how many "servings" the slice is of that recipe.

Arguably, this isn't completely accurate. As the bread stales it will lose some water and therefore some weight but, as they say, "Close enough for government work." As it is, both the bread box and the food scale live on top of the microwave, so it's convenient at our house and this way honey-bunny can slice off whatever hunks he wants without measuring and it will make no difference for me.

lynn_glenmont

HeidiCooksSupper wrote: »

Arguably, this isn't completely accurate. As the bread stales it will lose some water and therefore some weight but, as they say, "Close enough for government work." As it is, both the bread box and the food scale live on top of the microwave, so it's convenient at our house and this way honey-bunny can slice off whatever hunks he wants without measuring and it will make no difference for me.

As the bread stales? As the bread stales? This is homemade bread we're talking about? Mine doesn't really last long enough to go stale.

But, yeah, this is what I do now that the new recipe builder doesn't let you edit the name of your recipe anymore (I used to name them something like "Almond wheat bread, serving = 48 grams," or whatever amount that was close to a typical slice and would divide fairly evenly into the total number of grams in the loaf. That way I could see in the recipe editor what a typical slice would be. The only drawback of using the total number of grams as a serving size is that you can't see what tweaks in the recipe will do to the calories and other nutrients per slice -- at one gram a serving, most values are zero, except for calories, which tends to be 2 calories per gram for most of my recipes, but that covers a significant difference between 1.5 calories per gram and 2.49 calories per gram.

HeidiCooksSupper

I only use the old recipe builder and either edit the recipe or just put in a new one since each loaf of bread is a "what should I throw in the bowl today?" happening. Yes, they usually don't have time to get very stale but it will take us awhile to get through the 100% rye doorstop/brick that is today's creation. It's a dense sucker. Next loaf will probably be a hole-filled ciabatta or something else with the opposite texture to make up for it. Last week, in honor of the season, it was a honey-whole wheat challah. Since I'm not reliable enough to undertake the care and feeding of a starter, we satisfy our sourdough cravings with an occasional "Pauline" from Trader Joe's.

cosmichvoyager

I weigh hand-sliced bread slices. It's not 100% accurate but it's better than guessing for sure.

lynn_glenmont

HeidiCooksSupper wrote: »

I only use the old recipe builder and either edit the recipe or just put in a new one since each loaf of bread is a "what should I throw in the bowl today?" happening. Yes, they usually don't have time to get very stale but it will take us awhile to get through the 100% rye doorstop/brick that is today's creation. It's a dense sucker. Next loaf will probably be a hole-filled ciabatta or something else with the opposite texture to make up for it. Last week, in honor of the season, it was a honey-whole wheat challah. Since I'm not reliable enough to undertake the care and feeding of a starter, we satisfy our sourdough cravings with an occasional "Pauline" from Trader Joe's.

Yeah, I've had the same problem with starter. The challah sounds yummy.

allaboutthecake

In my recipe builder, I use ounces. You can use grams, it makes no difference which is used. I weigh the whole recipe. Therefore, the "# of servings = # of total recipe weight. I weigh each piece, no matter how big or small. So say I eat something that weighs 9.32 ounces, that is what the food diary looks like: "9.32 servings".