Please help me… bone-in venison stew recipe?

EmbeeKay

Hi, I am making a stew recipe today with a bone-in cut of venison. Typically when I make stew or soup, I weigh all of the ingredients as they're going in, and then weigh the final total product so that I know exactly how many grams my pot of stew is, and then I log it in 1 g servings.

In this case, with a giant bone in the cut of meat that will be removed at the end, how should I go about calculating calories in the recipe?

EmbeeKay

You know, I think I figured it out… I weighed the bone-in cut (4.74 pounds) and will just weigh the bone when I take it out at the end, and then I'll know how much meat I put in :-) someone correct me if I'm wrong but that's what I'm gonna do!

mbauer013

It'll be close, but bones also absorb a lot of juice and release "non-meat" componenets into the stew, like marrow, blood, calcium, etc. Why not cut the meat off the bone, unless it's a joint cut which can take for ever. BTW now I'm hungry for venison, its been too long!

EmbeeKay

Well the bone is part of what makes it so good! It's a shank, so that in and of itself makes it really tricky to cut the meat off the bone, but the bone puts a lot of gelatin into the broth… Which I guess should count for calories. Do you think maybe weigh the bone, and only subtract a portion of its weight? Like maybe pretend I put a few extra ounces of meat in?

mbauer013

I guess depends on how accurate you want to be, I'd weigh the bone, and maybe just subtract 5-10% for moisture absorbed during cooking and call it good. Its unlikely to cause a huge swing in calories.