weighing meat before or after it's cooked

reesegrace1

On the label of my turkey breast, it says that 4 oz serving has 58mg sodium. We counting sodium since my husband had a heart attack & is on a low sodium diet.
I have heart that you weigh meat BEFORE cooking, but i can't slice off a piece of thurkey breast & weigh it before cooking. So how do i weigh the meat?
and what about red meat like ground beef?

Lietchi

For the turkey breast:
- weigh the whole thing raw (then you know how many calories and sodium it contains in total)
- weigh the whole thing cooked
- weigh the individual portion, so you can calculate how many of the total calories and how much sodium is in that portion
(- not relevant for sodium, but don't forget to count cooking oil as well for the calories)

As for ground beef: I don't use that separately, it's always included in a dish with other ingredients (for example spaghetti sauce) but it's the same principle: weigh the total amount of meat and other raw ingredients, weigh the cooked dish and then calculate the portions.

deannalfisher

here's how i do it:
weight before
enter raw weight into a recipe (I call them like bulk chicken/bulk turkey)
weigh it cooked and enter serving number as total cooked weigh in oz

summery79

This is not the correct way to do things but I typically divide raw calorie counts into my serving size. For turkey or large roasts, I just cut my piece after cooking, weigh it and enter the cooked weight.

The "right" way we learned in dietetics school is to calculate the cooked edible portion weight using a yield percentage (there are books that provide the values). I do that when I work in food service but it's too much bother for personal use in my case.