i'm still confused about weighing foods...

mfoster1019

my biggest problem is meat. should it be done before or after? i only cook with ground turkey or boneless/skinless chicken breasts, and typically i weigh it afterwards. if i weight out 6oz chicken/turkey, then i put 6oz chicken/turkey (of whatever brand i am using) into my count. i don't know if i am over or under calculating though.

do these types of meats really lose all that much in the cooking process like a big steak or hamburger would?

shovav91

Generally, weigh things before. Water is released during the cooking process which often leaves the food weighing less although it still has the same caloric content.

mfoster1019

is there a general ratio i can go by? meaning, if i cook 1 lb of ground turkey, how much will it yield after i cook it?

Pebble321

You choose - just look for a database entry for "chicken breast raw" or "chicken breast cooked".

CharlieBarleyMom

With chicken - if baking, broiling, roasting, poaching -- I've found that there is a 26% loss of weight after cooking. I round that to 25% to make life easy. So, 4 oz. raw = 3 oz. cooked.

Ground turkey will be different based on the leanness of the meat. I will only buy 99% fat free... but a lot of people will buy the (lesser quality to me) higher ratio turkey. To me, if you're going to eat that, you might as well go with beef.

Just do some research on whatever it is you are cooking. There are A LOT of incorrect values in the database here... so you need to have a pretty good idea based on nutrition labels or other nutrition sites... Search engines work great!

mfoster1019

i looked in the database...i searched for raw and cooked. both the raw and cooked has the same calories for the same amount of meat. so this still leaves me confused

junyr

i looked in the database...i searched for raw and cooked. both the raw and cooked has the same calories for the same amount of meat. so this still leaves me confused

The water that cooks out contains no calories. 4oz of precook calories = 3oz of post cook calories.

dwallior3326

I guess then I'd go with what YOUR package of meat says...like I'm pretty sure they do serving sizes and all that based on raw. So weigh yours before and enter your own information and go off of that just to be safe. Because if both raw/cooked on the database is coming up the same, obviously something is wrong. I never realized that!

rockerbabyy

i always weigh my meats raw - if im doing something with ground turkey(taco meat, gravy, etc), i use the raw weight and make a recipe here, then set the servings and weigh the end result - divide it by the servings and call it good.

tigersword

Ingredients should always be weighed and measured raw.