Recipe calories.

ccruz985

I weigh all ingredients before they are cooked, cook, divide the portions, add up all the precooked cals, divide them by the portions, and that's how I get my calories per serving. I thought this was the most accurate way to assess calories but I read some posts about water content and weight being different after you cook it. Do you think the difference is negligible? Also, how do you calculate calories for homemade stock, is it even possible?

lichn

If you're measuring and logging ingredients pre-cooked and then selecting the number of portions accurately with the finished product, that sounds about as accurate as you can get. I don't see how the after cooking weight matters if you input every ingredient before cooking. The only thing that might change between uncooked and cooked ingredients is vitamin content, but that's not something you can be THAT precise about on here anyways so I wouldn't worry about it.

Stock I dunno since the ingredients are thrown out. I'd just scour the database for an equivalent, choose one in the middle of the caloric range unless I knew mine to be particularly high or low calorie (depends how much fat was on those bones) and not sweat being that precise.

CyberTone

There can be a lot of weight loss from water evaporation when cooking. Many vegetables, such as onions, green peppers, and mushrooms lose a lot of moisture while cooking; most meats also lose water content when cooked. I would advise against summing the raw weights of ingredients to determine the total weight of a Recipe after cooking. I can boil down many of my one-pot recipes by 200 to 300 grams depending on how thick I want the final batch to be.

If the final batch is too heavy to weigh, use a couple storage containers. Place the first container on the scale and tare to zero. Add part of the food, record the weight. Place the second container, tare, weigh, record; repeat until all food is weighed and recorded. Then add up the weights for the final total.

KarenSmith2018

I would say you are correct. That is how I have been measuring my portions from a reciepe. So long as you select pre cooked calorie entries and are dividing into equal size portions at the end then I don't see how it can be wrong. If you weighed the pre-cooked food out to be 1000grams though and a portion was 250grams pre-cooked and you then weighed 250grams cooked you could have an issue with regards to water loss. In that if you lost half the weight in the cooking process through reduced water eating 250grams of the cooked product would be 500grams of the pre-cooked weight and double the weight!! So fine if you are making equal size portions of whatever you have cooked i.e. recipe says divide by 4 but if you are eating it by weight you need to weigh the cooked product and take the cooked weight.