How do you track food that cooks in a sauce you won't consume

mariluny · February 2017

I made Ossobucco last weekend and i entered everything in the liquid (like wine, broth, canned tomatoes, some oil to sauté everything before hand, etc...) and but i ended up throwing away must of it afterwards, it was just used to braised the meat in.
I was thinking i should calculate the meat and the "sauce" separately maybe? And then add 1/2 out of 5 cups to my meal... are you guys calculating calories this way?

fitoverfortymom · February 2017

Unpopular answer: I add about .5 serving of the meat dish that soaked in the liquid to make up for the calories that the meat absorbed from sitting in liquid and call it good.

I'd love to hear how others figure this out. Hopefully without too many maths.

Spliner1969 · February 2017

I guess. If it's oil, like fried.. I'll compare what's left in the pan vs what I put in to use in the first place and go from there. If it's a braising liquid, and doesn't contain oil I don't bother logging it. Then again, I'm at maintenance now so I can get away with crap like that. You can do it by weight if you want, by weighing before and after what's left in the pan, but it gets a bit tedious to do it that way.

flatlndr · February 2017

I looked up our ossu buco recipe; the wine+broth was only 10% of the total calories. The beef was the predominant contributor. Therefore, I'd say count all the calories, and consider that 10% a little buffer.

ETA - To put that into perspective, one serving in our recipe was ~440 cals. Take out 10%, and you're down to just under 400 cals. That 40 cals is not enough to try to bother adjusting for.
ETA2 - Fixed many typos.

AFGP11 · February 2017

I count everything in the recipe. If I'm wrong, I gained a small extra deficit.

sunburntgalaxy · February 2017

I just log it all and it is a little added buffer in case I was off on something. I would rather be a little high then a little low.

cerise_noir · February 2017

With dishes like this, I log the meat (raw) in my diary separately (I log veg separately as well for something like a pot roast) then create a recipe for the sauce. When dish is done, remove meat and scrape off sauce then weigh the sauce. If the sauce is 200g, edit the sauce recipe to have 200 servings. Place plate with meat on scale, zero/tare it then spoon sauce until you've added the desired amount. The grams amount on the scale is the number of servings (eg, 40g sauce = 40 servings).

jennypapage · February 2017

i count it. sometimes i'll drink the sauce or dip some bread in it.i generally add enough liquid, that after it's cooked it will be a thickish sauce.

gdsmit1 · February 2017

AFGP11 wrote: »

I count everything in the recipe. If I'm wrong, I gained a small extra deficit.

This is what I do. I figure if I estimate high on the calories I eat, I'm losing just a little bit more.

Like others have said, oil is different. If we have something fried, I try my best to find the same thing in the database.

mariluny · February 2017

Thank you all!
Like some of you said, for some liquid i won't mind, broth or tomato based thing will add a 40 calories that i don't mind loging in extra or under but some heavier cream or wine based sauce, i can't log an unaccurate 200 or 300 calories if i don't actually eat it. I try to eat between 1200 to 1500 cal a day and that's just way too much to be over or under. But I'll try to do the sauce separately from the meat from now on, it should be more accurate.

jjpptt2 · February 2017

mariluny wrote: »

I made Ossobucco last weekend and i entered everything in the liquid (like wine, broth, canned tomatoes, some oil to sauté everything before hand, etc...) and but i ended up throwing away must of it afterwards, it was just used to braised the meat in.
I was thinking i should calculate the meat and the "sauce" separately maybe? And then add 1/2 out of 5 cups to my meal... are you guys calculating calories this way?

That's basically what I do. I know how much broth/beer/whatever a recipe calls for, then make a reasonable approximation for how much of that total volume is absorbed by the meat. If I'm really uncertain about the cals, I'll add some extra carbs and/or fat to my entry just to be safe (i.e. I'll add a little extra potato or butter or oil or whatever).

annacole94 · February 2017

I generally just *kitten* it. If there are aspects of the sauce that are calorie heavy, I log some of those to my meal. But if I can see that most of those calories are in the marinade I didn't eat, or sitting in the pan after the meal, no I don't bother. If your rate of loss is not what you expect, then you start weighing and logging more strictly. If it is what you expect... don't burn yourself out on small details.

ChristopherLimoges · February 2017

Add only amounts needed, and consume the extras left behind in portioned servings: adding minimal amounts will require experience in the kitchen and or cooking over time; consuming the extras left behind is easier, if a recipe or meal has 4 portions of meat served in a certain amount of sauce then just divide the meat first and the sauce or other components(usually of a stew) next into fourths. In cases like these trouble often comes from Pre-Mixed Ingredients and Inedible Ingredients, though the loss/gain is also minimal, it usually isn't too much trouble to miss the 50-150 or 200 calories if for less strict diet opposed to body building competitors.

JeromeBarry1 · February 2017

The problem I see with trying to be precise in this case is: The meat, cooking in the sauce, will render its fat.

The fat leaves the meat and stays in the sauce, changing the composition of each.

The best I've found is to use a 'raw' value for the meat and ignore the sauce, considering that the fat lost and the sauce gained are approximately equal. If you're adding a bunch of sauce to your plate and sopping it up with bread, log it. Only ignore the sauce if you're discarding it.

How do you track food that cooks in a sauce you won't consume

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