Recipes with sauces

Septembergirl23

Hi!

When you enter a recipe with a sauce how do you count the carbs, calories & protein if you are not actually eating the sauce? I made a recipe in my instapot that has orange juice in the sauce but when it comes time to eat only a very small portion of the sauce makes it to the plate. It becomes more of a glaze after cooking.

Thank you!

goal06082021

If possible, I create a separate recipe for the sauce and do some educated guesstimation/math/weighing to figure out how much actually makes it onto my plate. It sounds like you're making something that you coat in sauce and then cook, like a duck a l'orange or orange chicken, right? The tricky thing there is that cooking will probably cause water to evaporate, which makes it harder to estimate how much sauce is on the meat. Here's how I would approach it.

1. Make your sauce and create a recipe for the full amount that you made, before cooking.
2. Weigh the sauce and use that weight in grams as the number of servings (i.e., 1 gram of sauce = 1 serving).
3. Determine how much sauce you actually use to coat the food. I would do this by weighing the food before and after coating; I would either write down those weights and do some subtraction, or place the food on the scale, tare, coat in sauce, and then put it back on the scale and that should show me just the difference. Use that number when logging - if you make 4 servings of orange chicken and use 200g of sauce to coat, 1 serving of the finished orange chicken contains 50g of sauce.

You could get super picky about it and do a lot of math and measurement to figure water evaporation and all of that but I'm probably the only person who would want to do that, so I'll spare you that, unless you do want to get that granular with it.

Septembergirl23

Separate recipes for sauces! Why didn't I think of that? It makes perfect sense. I was thinking in terms of the whole recipe. I weigh my portions so this will definitely be accurate. Thank you!

goal06082021

You're welcome! I did this with some Salisbury steak that I meal-prepped for the week. There's no overlap in ingredients for the meat and sauce, so I just made them separate recipes.