Anyone Bake Their Bread? I Have Issues...

That's not an issue of inaccuracy, though. Any homemade items needs to be based on the ingredients used. If you have a food like bread where recipes can vary and sizes are all over the place, you can't just pick an entry and expect it to be accurate. And "light" bread in particular is usually low calorie because the weight of a slice is low.

The artisan bread might not be close either. If you want to know, you should put in your own information.

For non-restaurant food, if it didn't come with a nutritional label (aka, you made it yourself), and it's not a single ingredient food, then just choosing an entry from the database is a HUGE mistake. Yes, it's quick, but even assuming that the person who made the entry entered it correctly based on what THEY were eating, the chances of it matching what YOU are eating, especially in quantity, are slim to none.

If you made it, create a recipe for it and log what you're ACTUALLY eating. There's no excuse not to - the recipe builder isn't the most user friendly part of the site, to be fair, but still - if you're serious, you take the time to do it. The absolutely only time I'll use a random entry from the database is if I've eaten at a restaurant that doesn't provide nutritional info and I'm not totally certain of the ingredients/proportions in what I've ordered, and even then I try my hardest to find something that makes the most sense and try to over-estimate the portion. But that's very infrequent - the vast majority of the time I'm entering the actual weights/measures of what I'm actually eating.

It seems to me it would be much easier to just weigh the flour you use for your bread and look up the calories of that and then divide that number by the number of slices in your loaf.

I don't know if yeast has calories, probably. But if your recipe is more complex than yeast, flour, and water, then I would use the recipe builder tool.

I calculate all the ingredients I use, weigh the loaf, and weigh the slice.
Do the division, voila.

A 45 calorie slice of "light" bread is usually those saw-dust flavored, very small, sad things that only sortof resemble bread.

Your best bet is as described above. Add up everything in the recipe, and get a total number of calories for the loaf. Weigh the finished loaf in its entirety, then weigh the slice you cut off. Then do the division. Guaranteed accuracy.

lemurcat12 wrote: »

That's not an issue of inaccuracy, though. Any homemade items needs to be based on the ingredients used. If you have a food like bread where recipes can vary and sizes are all over the place, you can't just pick an entry and expect it to be accurate. And "light" bread in particular is usually low calorie because the weight of a slice is low.

The artisan bread might not be close either. If you want to know, you should put in your own information.

Yep. I make my own bread, but I've entered my recipes into MFP so they are accurate. I enter *all* of my homemade stuff by hand. It takes like 10 minutes, and will save you lots of frustration later on.

Another thought to add - the amount of flour necessary to make a well risen bread dough will vary based on the time of year and the humidity in the air.

Bread is very high in calories, simply because one quarter of a cup of flour is 100 calories. If you make a loaf, let it cool completely, slice it, then freeze it. Seriously, it's very important for you to make bread a special treat and not an everyday habit: major calorie bomb!

OP is clearly trying to lose weight and avoid calorie bombs, though.

This isn't about you. It's about her and her question.

FatOldBat wrote: »

Bread is very high in calories, simply because one quarter of a cup of flour is 100 calories. If you make a loaf, let it cool completely, slice it, then freeze it. Seriously, it's very important for you to make bread a special treat and not an everyday habit: major calorie bomb!

^^Not so for everyone. I eat it everyday, and have lost 160+ pounds. Nothing is a "special" treat for me. If I want it, I make it fit in my daily calorie budget. Moderation in all things has worked very well for me, and I will continue to eat what I want in moderation.

I weigh the cooked loaf & enter this as number of servings in the recipe builder.

I then weigh each slice I cut & enter this in my food diary as number of servings I eat.

Yes I noticed they had changed number of servings in the new (improved!!?) recipe builder.

If my loaf of bread weighs 880g, I log it as 88 servings in the recipe builder.
In my food diary, I log 144g slices of bread as 14.4 servings.

I bake my own bread and enter the recipes exactly....

But there is an easy rule of thumb:
Normal bread (without added fat, or not more than, say, 1-2 tablespoon of oil per loaf) is almost always between 200 and 300 calories per 100g, but usually around 250. 100g = 3.5 oz.

Why that is -- because bread is mostly flour and water. Flour is mostly starch, with a bit of fiber added, and therefore averages 365 for white flour. The higher the wholemeal content, the more starch is replaced with fibre, and so the calorie content goes slightly down.

When making bread dough, you add water to the flour. In most recipes, between 1/3 and 1/2 of the dough is water. 1/3 is quite dry. 1/2 makes a very wet dough, almost impossible to knead and shape if not using rye flour. When you bake the bread, some of the water evaporates. Generally, wholemeal flour can take up more water. Therefore white breads tend to be higher in calories (>250 cal/100g) than wholemeal ones (<250 cal/100g).

Generally, this makes bread a calorie-dense food -- low calorie density is <100 calories/100g, but bread is >200.

That 's not surprising, as bread is an archetypical symbol for nutrition generally!

What that has to do with 'slices' -- if the bread is very light and airy, a slice is 30g (1 oz) (eg toast), if the bread is heavier and denser, a slice is up to 50g (1.5-2 oz) if the bread has a standard tin form. (Larger slices of free-shaped breads weigh more, of course.) and of course slices can be thicker and thinner. I put my slices on the scale.

Therefore they say a slice of toast with a bit of butter is 100 calories. For a denser bread (as homemade breads tend to be), one slice without the butter will already be 100-125 calories.

45 calories for a slice of bread is very rare -- those slices must be very small.