How do you log a glaze?

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Homemaker57
Homemaker57 Posts: 106 Member
in Food and Nutrition
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How do you log something like this? Some of it will fall off, some might not be used...? Same question with how to log marinades.

Also, while I'm at it. How do you know whether a meat weight is raw or cooked? I'd assume most are for the raw meat but for example if you have several pieces of different sizes do you have to memorize all their weights before cooking? :-p Or those portion estimators (three ounces is the size of a deck of cards or whatever) does that mean a cooked portion of that size had that raw weight, or cooked weight? In other words if a cooked piece of meat is the size of a deck of cards is that 3oz raw or 3oz cooked?

Newbie questions!

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  • Homemaker57
    Homemaker57 Posts: 106 Member
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    Can I bump my own post? Is that allowed? :)
  • Kalikel
    Kalikel Posts: 9,626 Member
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    Logging a glaze will be an imperfect thing. Some will end up on the pan. Some will end up on your plate.

    You can enter the glaze as a recipe, weigh the total and then weigh the remainder after you've used it, so that you can enter it that way.

    You're getting very deep into the minutiae of weighing here! :)

    It's like using oil to cook - it's nearly impossible to get an exact total. Just do the best you can...or close to the best you can. :)
  • madeleadele
    madeleadele Posts: 64 Member
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    I've also wondered about this! Due to general inconsistencies in calories, nutrition facts, etc. there's no way to know for sure how much you're eating to the calorie, but as a general rule I usually add half of the marinade I made to my diary (perhaps an overestimate, but better than disillusionment about a low calorie count for the day). I usually only marinade a single serving of meat (cooking for myself), so there's not much marinade to begin with, though.

    In short, I have no good answer. And, since I only cook single servings, I don't have to worry about memorizing calories for different cuts of meat! Hope you find a solid answer :)
  • theawill519
    theawill519 Posts: 242 Member
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    I wonder about this A LOT. I use the copycat Cracker Barrel chicken tenderloin recipe all the time. It calls for 1/2c light Italian dressing, 1.5tsp of honey, and 1tsp of lime juice. You marinade a pound of tenderloins in that for an hour, then dump it all in a pan and cook it... but it cooks down to nothing. There's no "sauce" left in the pan, you're just eating the marinaded chicken. I always log half of the ingredients in the marinade (DH eats the other half :) ), but it always leaves me feeling like I'm not calculating it correctly! Boo!
  • toriraeh
    toriraeh Posts: 105 Member
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    Personally what I do for marinades or sauces or whatever is if it's something I drizzle over top, I log what I use (a tablespoon or whatever) but if it's a marinade or a liquid I cook in, I just log it. Some is gonna be soaked into the meat, some will be cooked down, you just can't be too accurate so I prefer a bit of cushion. Helps cover for other inaccuracies anyway.

    As for meat, when I build a recipe with say two chicken breasts for me and my husband, mine is the only one being logged but all the other ingredient are being logged as one recipe so what I do is this: I weigh my meat raw, use the weight of the piece I will eat and double it (or triple, quadruple, depends on how many servings you do. I do two) that way when I log one serving, it's the correct weight.

    I prefer logging my meat raw because I feel like it's more accurate. Cooking changes the properties of the meat and I feel like it's hard to be exact. And also, heaven forbid you make something with shredded or chopped meat, that would be impossible to weigh once it's in the dish. I weigh all my meat as soon as I buy it, put it all in individual bags and write the weight on it so I know exactly what I'm using and don't have to use the scale while I'm trying to cook (as much).

    I'm by no means an expert but that's my method and it works for me! Good luck!

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