Cooking - how and if does it affect calories?

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charlie00134
charlie00134 Posts: 27 Member
in Food and Nutrition
I've started making my own sweet potato wedges and fries.
So far I've been putting them into MFP as the weight of the sweet potatoes plus the amount of oil however I seem to think how they are cooked affects the calories, I know it affects GI rating.
EG would homemade wedges be healthier than homemade chips due to a lesser surface area or does it not matter. Both baked in the oven.

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  • jemhh
    jemhh Posts: 14,261 Member
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    Cooking a potato causes it to lose moisture (water) which makes it more calorie dense. For this reason, you should either weigh the potatoes before cooking and use the raw potato entry or used the cooked entry with the after cooked weight.
  • seska422
    seska422 Posts: 3,217 Member
    edited January 2016
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    Use whichever cut you like. The increased surface area might mean a bit more water is lost during baking but not much more.

    Weigh the raw ingredients and use that for the overall calories and nutrition.

    The sweet potatoes will lose a little water during baking but the overall calorie count won't change. The cooked sweet potatoes will have more calories per gram because the water that was lost is no longer included in the weight.

    The easiest thing to do is to use the recipe builder. Weigh your raw ingredients and use those to get the overall calories and nutrition. After baking, weigh the whole recipe to get the final weight and use that (in 1 gram or 100 gram increments) for the number of servings for the recipe. That way, you can just weigh your portion and enter that as the number of servings that you ate.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 27,996 Member
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    seska422 wrote: »
    Use whichever cut you like. The increased surface area might mean a bit more water is lost during baking but not much more.

    Weigh the raw ingredients and use that for the overall calories and nutrition.

    The sweet potatoes will lose a little water during baking but the overall calorie count won't change. The cooked sweet potatoes will have more calories per gram because the water that was lost is no longer included in the weight.

    The easiest thing to do is to use the recipe builder. Weigh your raw ingredients and use those to get the overall calories and nutrition. After baking, weigh the whole recipe to get the final weight and use that (in 1 gram or 100 gram increments) for the number of servings for the recipe. That way, you can just weigh your portion and enter that as the number of servings that you ate.

    Ya, I use the recipe builder for my baked sweet potato fries. OP - you mentioned sweet potatoes and oil but left out salt and chipotle powder. Nom nom nom.

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