Calories added poaching

hmhill17

One of my go to proteins for salads or just mid morning snack is Instant Pot poached chicken. It's 5 cups of water and a tbsp of salt. However, as an experiment I dropped out the salt and replaced half a cup of water with buffalo wing sauce. That is 120 calories. Which got me curious about how calories would be added to something in the poaching liquid. Which of these would you think is more likely?

1. All the calories would be added to the chicken
2. Calories would be added based on the ratio of sauce to water
3. Some other formula

In terms of actual calories per serving, at least in my example, it's only an 18 calorie difference, so not a big deal either way. I'm thinking about in general for when my kids ask me to try to make something they see on TV, like butter poached lobster.

missysippy930

Why not just poach the chicken and add the sauce after? Poaching it in diluted sauce wouldn’t add many calories, as the liquid isn’t absorbed totally into the chicken, and the liquid is discarded after poaching. If you want the chicken spicier, maybe use crushed red pepper flakes in the poaching liquid.

apullum

If you *really* wanted to, you could figure out the proportion of the poaching liquid that was buffalo sauce. Then, you could weigh the poaching liquid before cooking, then weigh after cooking to figure out how much was absorbed or evaporated. THEN, since you know what proportion of that liquid was buffalo sauce, you could figure out roughly how much of the sauce might have been absorbed.

Even that is not going to be exact, though, because we don't know what's been absorbed vs. evaporated. When water evaporates, the fat/spices/etc. in the buffalo sauce are left behind. That would throw off the proportions.

I doubt I would actually do any of this; I might try it one time just out of curiosity. What I would most likely do is log 25% or whatever of the buffalo sauce, assuming it's mostly not absorbed.

lynn_glenmont

apullum wrote: »

If you *really* wanted to, you could figure out the proportion of the poaching liquid that was buffalo sauce. Then, you could weigh the poaching liquid before cooking, then weigh after cooking to figure out how much was absorbed or evaporated. THEN, since you know what proportion of that liquid was buffalo sauce, you could figure out roughly how much of the sauce might have been absorbed.

Even that is not going to be exact, though, because we don't know what's been absorbed vs. evaporated. When water evaporates, the fat/spices/etc. in the buffalo sauce are left behind. That would throw off the proportions.

I doubt I would actually do any of this; I might try it one time just out of curiosity. What I would most likely do is log 25% or whatever of the buffalo sauce, assuming it's mostly not absorbed.

I wouldn't do any of this either, but I think if someone wanted to, they would need to assume that the proportion of buffalo sauce to water would be equal in the poaching liquid and in the liquid in the chicken breast after the poaching was done (i.e., that like salt or heat, the sauce would migrate from where it was more concentrated to where it was less concentrated until things were equal). I guess you could check the USDA successor-to-the-nutrient database for the amount of liquid in X grams of raw chicken breast. Then the rest is just arithmetic.

I think of myself as a bit of a numbers geek, but I can't get excited about doing all that. I would wait to sauce the chicken after it was cooked, or, if I had already added the sauce to the poaching water, just count it all to remind myself not to do silly things like that in the future.