how to calculate for homemade soup

gemlynch

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how to calculate for a soup I make. I start with water and a quartered chicken, add veggies later and then remove all chicken parts an hour later(breasts previously) skin and debone and add back the meat.... if I choose a rotisserie chicken it will not calculate all the drippings and if I choose a whole chicken then the removal of the skin will not be calculated. Perhaps I am just not thinking of this properly.... any ideas appreciated.

deannalfisher

you can use the recipe builder - put all the ingrediants you use into it; let it cook down and then enter the serving size as the total weight of the soup in oz or g once it has cooked

melissawill2017

So essentially boneless, skinless chicken? You can calculate that individually and the drippings would be like chicken broth. You could measure that out and use an MFP calculation. That's how I would do it but someone else may have a better suggestion. Recipes can be tricky at times when trying to enter in the correct calorie content; I just try to use my best estimate if I can't be exact.

OldHobo

gemlynch wrote: »

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how to calculate for a soup I make. I start with water and a quartered chicken, add veggies later and then remove all chicken parts an hour later(breasts previously) skin and debone and add back the meat.... if I choose a rotisserie chicken it will not calculate all the drippings and if I choose a whole chicken then the removal of the skin will not be calculated. Perhaps I am just not thinking of this properly.... any ideas appreciated.

I've tried to nail this down a few different times and I just don't think there is any way to calculate fat and protein in stocks and broths with precision.

You describe cooking chicken skin in water for an hour then removing it. Clearly some, but not all, of the fat from the skin will be will be rendered into the water. If the water was boiling some of that fat is going to emulsify into the broth, so even if you cool it in the refrigerator and skim the fat from the top there will be fat trapped in the broth the way oil is trapped in mayonnaise.

Cooking dissolves collagen, which has calories, protein, and other nutrients, from connective tissue and skin. You'll get some, but not all, of that too. Let me know if you figure out how to measure it though.

My best suggestion for logging based on the way you describe the cooking are:

1. Take pains to simmer not boil.
2. Try to remove the fat floating atop the broth. Try a fat separator if you don't want to add the refrigeration step.
3. Log the stock/broth you are producing using the nutrition information from a GOOD store-bought stock.