i'm still confused about weighing foods...

mfoster1019
mfoster1019 Posts: 152 Member
edited November 2024 in Food and Nutrition
my biggest problem is meat. should it be done before or after? i only cook with ground turkey or boneless/skinless chicken breasts, and typically i weigh it afterwards. if i weight out 6oz chicken/turkey, then i put 6oz chicken/turkey (of whatever brand i am using) into my count. i don't know if i am over or under calculating though.

do these types of meats really lose all that much in the cooking process like a big steak or hamburger would?

Replies

  • shovav91
    shovav91 Posts: 2,335 Member
    Generally, weigh things before. Water is released during the cooking process which often leaves the food weighing less although it still has the same caloric content.
  • mfoster1019
    mfoster1019 Posts: 152 Member
    is there a general ratio i can go by? meaning, if i cook 1 lb of ground turkey, how much will it yield after i cook it?
  • Pebble321
    Pebble321 Posts: 6,423 Member
    You choose - just look for a database entry for "chicken breast raw" or "chicken breast cooked".
  • CharlieBarleyMom
    CharlieBarleyMom Posts: 727 Member
    With chicken - if baking, broiling, roasting, poaching -- I've found that there is a 26% loss of weight after cooking. I round that to 25% to make life easy. So, 4 oz. raw = 3 oz. cooked.

    Ground turkey will be different based on the leanness of the meat. I will only buy 99% fat free... but a lot of people will buy the (lesser quality to me) higher ratio turkey. To me, if you're going to eat that, you might as well go with beef.

    Just do some research on whatever it is you are cooking. There are A LOT of incorrect values in the database here... so you need to have a pretty good idea based on nutrition labels or other nutrition sites... Search engines work great!
  • mfoster1019
    mfoster1019 Posts: 152 Member
    i looked in the database...i searched for raw and cooked. both the raw and cooked has the same calories for the same amount of meat. so this still leaves me confused :(
  • junyr
    junyr Posts: 416 Member
    i looked in the database...i searched for raw and cooked. both the raw and cooked has the same calories for the same amount of meat. so this still leaves me confused :(

    The water that cooks out contains no calories. 4oz of precook calories = 3oz of post cook calories.
  • dwallior3326
    dwallior3326 Posts: 98
    I guess then I'd go with what YOUR package of meat says...like I'm pretty sure they do serving sizes and all that based on raw. So weigh yours before and enter your own information and go off of that just to be safe. Because if both raw/cooked on the database is coming up the same, obviously something is wrong. I never realized that!
  • rockerbabyy
    rockerbabyy Posts: 2,258 Member
    i always weigh my meats raw - if im doing something with ground turkey(taco meat, gravy, etc), i use the raw weight and make a recipe here, then set the servings and weigh the end result - divide it by the servings and call it good.
  • tigersword
    tigersword Posts: 8,059 Member
    Ingredients should always be weighed and measured raw.
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