Bacon weighing

fatal_degree
fatal_degree Posts: 22 Member
edited November 23 in Food and Nutrition
We are having jowl bacon tonight and I am wondering how to calculate the calories. A pretty high percentage of them drains off as fat drippings to be used later.

Do I simply calculate based on pre-cooked weight and leave it at that? Or do I subtract the weight of the fat drippings and deduct those calories?

Replies

  • ladyhusker39
    ladyhusker39 Posts: 1,406 Member
    You only need to log what you actually eat, not what's left in the pan. If you use the drippings for something else, you'll count it there.

    And, YUM!
  • jennybearlv
    jennybearlv Posts: 1,519 Member
    I usually weigh meat raw, but for something as fatty as bacon look for a cooked entry. My bacon has the cooked calories on the package. The only time I weigh my bacon raw is if I cook the rest of my meal in the fat.
  • fatal_degree
    fatal_degree Posts: 22 Member
    Unfortunately my package doesn't have a cooked calorie listing and couldn't find anything that differentiates between the two for this cut of fatty meat. We save all the fat drippings for other cooking. My thought process is to measure the drippings and deduct the caloriesof that from the raw calorie value.
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,986 Member
    If you eat the drippings later then why not count the raw bacon you had and ignore the drippings for the later meal? it still comes down to the same.

    If you don't... I made meatballs for a soup the other day and cooked them in the oven. While I love this soup I always wondered why it left me so hungry. So I used paper towles to mop up all the drippings, let them dry to discount for water and assumed everything in the towel is fat. The balls had lots quite a lot of calories I found out and I was undereating for dinner on those days where I had this soup :*
  • fatal_degree
    fatal_degree Posts: 22 Member
    edited January 2018
    I figured it would be better to cook the whole pound of jowl bacon & deduct drippings because there is about 1/2 a cup of fat left behind. That much fat gets used in Tbls. sized portions for cooking eggs or pan searing veggies over the course of weeks of meals. Much of it won't be used by me, but rather by my spouse. He is on the opposite end of the spectrum from me....he can eat 4000 cal a day and still weigh 130. So I have to watch portions and calories & and he just eats constantly without thought to anything but the grinding hunger in his bones.
  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 34,458 Member
    If it's regular cut bacon I just count it as 40 calories per slice. Is that 100% accurate? Probably not. Luckily, 100% accuracy isn't necessary on every single item. ::shrug::

    When I use the bacon drippings later, I count that at that time.
  • fatal_degree
    fatal_degree Posts: 22 Member
    It's not regular cut bacon. It is Jowl bacon, which is a much fattier cut from the cheek of the pig. We buy it BECAUSE it puts off fat that we can use later.

    1 oz jowl bacon usda 189 calories. I assume that is before it is cooked though.

    Once cooked 1# jowl bacon loses 1/4# of fat. I figure that is a loss of 1/4 of the net calories in a pound.
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