Raw or cooked

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batbatterup214
batbatterup214 Posts: 2 Member
in Introduce Yourself
Do you count the weight of meat before or after it's cooked? Cooking in air fryer

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  • tamazinegrace
    tamazinegrace Posts: 25 Member
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    Before I think :)
  • Ed_Zilla
    Ed_Zilla Posts: 207 Member
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    Depends.

    When I cook 80/20 ground beef on the grill, sooo much fat drips off I weigh after - after all - a 4 oz. burger will cook down to 2.5-2.7 oz....that's a lot of fat loss. Same with bacon, bratwursts, or breakfast sausage.

    Some foods lose nothing when cooked...like eggs.

    Good question - but I think you know how to do it now. CalorieKing.com has before/after cooked calories on some items.
  • kimny72
    kimny72 Posts: 16,013 Member
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    Raw will usually be more accurate, as length of cooking time will affect the dryness of the finished product which affects the weight.

    But what's most important is you use the appropriate database entry. The USDA offers values of both raw and cooked, so if you add those words to your search you should bring up USDA entries. Like "chicken raw" or "chicken roasted". For an air fryer, I would guess "baked" would be the best one to use.
  • Teabythesea_
    Teabythesea_ Posts: 559 Member
    edited February 2019
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    Ed_Zilla wrote: »
    Depends.

    When I cook 80/20 ground beef on the grill, sooo much fat drips off I weigh after - after all - a 4 oz. burger will cook down to 2.5-2.7 oz....that's a lot of fat loss. Same with bacon, bratwursts, or breakfast sausage.

    Some foods lose nothing when cooked...like eggs.

    Good question - but I think you know how to do it now. CalorieKing.com has before/after cooked calories on some items.

    Adding to this, if you're going by the cooked weight make sure you're using an accurate entry for cooked, not raw. Additionally, if you're going by cooked weight do not use the nutrition label information as that is raw weight and most of the weight lost in cooking is moisture with some fat. So, if you're logging that cooked burger using the nutrition label with information you will be consuming many more calories than you think.

    For example... 4oz of 80/20 beef raw is about 280 calories. Let's say that cooks down to 2.5oz and you log in using the raw nutritional information. You'd be innacurately logging that burger as having 175 calories when its really 280, with some minor, negligable difference due to loss of moisture (again, with some fat, not all of it is fat).

    I've seen some bacon and sausage packages that specify cooked, drained, in which case it's ok to go off their cooked weight. In cases where its raw weight I've seen some people measure the drippings and use the pork, fat USDA entry to manually subtract the calories.

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