Does baking change the calories of a recipe?

There is some moisture loss. The raw food going in will weigh more than the finished product.

There are chemical changes. Sugars caramelise, deliciously.

Gas pockets expand and doughs harden up. Fluffy muffins.

But the calories remain the same.

Calories are originally worked out by incinerating the item to ash and measuring the energy (calories) given off. Oven temperatures are usually far south of incineration. Our stomachs finish off the destruction process, releasing the energy potential of the food.

It depends on the foods and how you're cooking them, really. Meat, for example, usually loses volume and calories during cooking because the fat drips off. If, however, you're making meatloaf the calorie count won't change much because the fat is still in the loaf. In the case of the meatloaf it might even increase a bit because cooking makes the meat more digestible.

Cooking many other foods makes them more digestible so that we're getting more calories out of the foods when we eat them. There are a lot of unknowns around how a lot of this works. In my very humble opinion, we can only work with the data we have, the calorie changes are probably not statistically relevant for a single serving and the differences in calories gained or lost during cooking individual items may very well come close to balancing themselves out in a recipe. If not, your weight loss results will be that you aren't losing weight as quickly as you should and you can adjust your calorie goal.

No. As much as we'd like to believe it the calories do not magically melt away during the baking process. Use the recipe builder and the full amount of calories given per muffin.

smiles4jo wrote: »

When I make a recipe, I’ll put all the ingredients into the recipe builder and then bake. Once it’s done, I’ll weigh the finished product in grams and that becomes my number of servings. Then, every time I have a serving, I weigh it individually and record that many servings.

For instance, you make a dozen muffins and the total weight of all the baked muffins is 1200 grams, so you’d enter 1200 servings. The first time you have a muffin, you weigh that particular muffin and it is 105 grams, so you log 105 servings. The next time, the muffin is 118 grams, so you log 118 servings. Third time, the muffin is only 92 grams (poor muffin!), so you log 92 servings.

Doing it this way, you know exactly how many calories are in each muffin and you don’t just assume that they’re all the same.

This is the way I do all my recipes as well. Especially since I don't always want to do the math when I want a slightly larger portion of something like pasta or casserole dishes. Much easier to do servings by weight.