weighing meat before or after it's cooked

reesegrace1
reesegrace1 Posts: 66 Member
edited December 2024 in Food and Nutrition
On the label of my turkey breast, it says that 4 oz serving has 58mg sodium. We counting sodium since my husband had a heart attack & is on a low sodium diet.
I have heart that you weigh meat BEFORE cooking, but i can't slice off a piece of thurkey breast & weigh it before cooking. So how do i weigh the meat?
and what about red meat like ground beef?

Replies

  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 6,930 Member
    edited March 2020
    For the turkey breast:
    - weigh the whole thing raw (then you know how many calories and sodium it contains in total)
    - weigh the whole thing cooked
    - weigh the individual portion, so you can calculate how many of the total calories and how much sodium is in that portion
    (- not relevant for sodium, but don't forget to count cooking oil as well for the calories)

    As for ground beef: I don't use that separately, it's always included in a dish with other ingredients (for example spaghetti sauce) but it's the same principle: weigh the total amount of meat and other raw ingredients, weigh the cooked dish and then calculate the portions.
  • deannalfisher
    deannalfisher Posts: 5,600 Member
    here's how i do it:
    weight before
    enter raw weight into a recipe (I call them like bulk chicken/bulk turkey)
    weigh it cooked and enter serving number as total cooked weigh in oz
  • summery79
    summery79 Posts: 116 Member
    This is not the correct way to do things but I typically divide raw calorie counts into my serving size. For turkey or large roasts, I just cut my piece after cooking, weigh it and enter the cooked weight.

    The "right" way we learned in dietetics school is to calculate the cooked edible portion weight using a yield percentage (there are books that provide the values). I do that when I work in food service but it's too much bother for personal use in my case.
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