Help with nutrients for a home made pudding

Roger_Williams

Since the doctor recommended my wife and I to cut out milk-based products we have substituted soy milk, which seems to work very well. My wife makes a delicious soy milk custard pudding, but when I searched for it there was nothing quite "right" in the database. The pudding is about the size of a dinner plate, and we cut it into six slices. I guessed the calories at 90 per slice but I really have no experience or feeling for what is appropriate. Can anyone suggest what might be reasonable for calories, fat(s), total carbohydrates and sugar? I do note that soy milk seems to have some less desirable unsaturated fats but those may be more difficult to guestimate.

runner456

Since you made it yourself can you figure it out by the nutrients in the ingredients you added, then just divide the total by the serving size? It will probably be still a guesstimate but should be closer...

CoachJ77

Well I am pretty old school about these things. I would get the soy milk she used and look at its contents. Write down all the useful things you want to know, ie fat, cals, carbs, and protein and do this for everything else in the mixture. Then after you total it all divide it by 6. Then you will have an exact amount of everything for each slice.

Roger_Williams

Hmmm. "Do it yourself?" That makes sense. Thank you both. It was my wife who made the pudding so I'll ask her to list what she used and then see if I can find out what the nutrients are for each of the ingredients. But doesn't the cooking affect nutrients? I know if you use wine in cooking a stew, for instance, none of the alcohol survives. I really know nothing about the details of this and thought it might be possible for more knowledgeable people to guess the values. Getting it slightly wrong is not going to affect my totals very much (yesterday was the first time in months that we had custard pudding!).

kiffypooh

I set up an account at www.sparkrecipes.com/ and enter all the ingredients into the recipe builder, which gives you a break down and the total nutritional facts and then add it to my data base on here (usually named Catherine's chicken, or whatever it is). It's there for future uses and it's pretty close to accurate.
I also wonder about what cooking does to the nutrients. My other issue is with marinates or things like that. If you enter all the ingredients for a marinate and end up throwing half of it away, how do you add that, or not add that? I figure it all comes out in the wash so to speak.

Roger_Williams

Kiffypooh (or may I call you Catherine?) I must visit sparkrecipes as that sounds like a very useful service. I managed to get all the information together for the caramel custard pudding but it was not easy. I ended up making a table in which I entered all the individual nutrient figures for the different ingredients and then totaled them. It took a couple of hours, not something I'd like to do for every food not yet in the database. I think I'll keep my eyes open for foods with "Catherine" in the title, as I now know these will have been carefully researched. As for marinates, I don't know anything about them. Sorry. I'm better at eating things. <grin>

Roger_Williams

Hi again, Kiffypooh.

I visited Sparkrecipes.com and signed up. I loved the free recipe nutrient calculator. In five minutes it did what had taken me a couple of hours reading labels and calculating the various conversion factors. Thanks for the pointer. Great site. I also liked the first of their daily E-mails, which was in my mailbox this morning. I was relieved to see that my laborious calculations from the labels were not all that different from the instant calculator values.

kiffypooh

I'm glad to know that sparks was so close to what you got. I ended up canceling their newsletters because I was getting tons of them, but they sounded very interesting.
The funny thing about the "Catherine's" recipes is that there are a lot more then I entered so someone else is as smart as I am