Home recipe calorie count please help!

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latysh
latysh Posts: 29
in Food and Nutrition
Do you log in RAW ingredients ? (Into recipe creator)
I made meat loaf yesterday and need to figure out how much calories is in it. Its 50/50 ground pork and beef so do I log in RAW pork and RAW beef amounts that I have measured before cooking or go off the already cooked entire thing ?
PLEASE HELP!

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  • dls06
    dls06 Posts: 6,774 Member
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    create a recipe and enter everything raw. Enter the servings and it will do the work for you.
  • cmayfield3
    cmayfield3 Posts: 176 Member
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    It's probably more accurate to log them as raw if you can. Just make sure you are pulling the values for raw from the nutritional database. Likewise if you log the meat after it's cooked, you need to look for cooked values in the database.
  • latysh
    latysh Posts: 29
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    Hhhhmmm I am just confused because my RAW weight of the meat was 2293 and my cooked one was 1250. So when dividing portions which one do I use ?
  • lmalaschak
    lmalaschak Posts: 346 Member
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    I usually enter raw ingredients...you probably would for meat loaf. If, for example, you're going to make tacos and you brown some ground beef and drain it and rinse it, you would use the "ground beef browned, drained, rinsed" one, because if you use the raw calorie count for that it will be way too high. The draining and rinsing takes many calories off. But with meat loaf you'll still have lots of those calories in there since it's baked. I don't like to use the foods that say things like "fresh mushrooms, stir-fried" because I have no idea how they were stir-fried, if they used a teaspoon of oil or three tablespoons. That isn't specific enough for me. So if I'm going to saute some mushrooms I enter fresh raw mushrooms and then I also enter whatever oil I might use. It takes a bit more time to separate out your ingredients that way but I feel the calorie count is much more accurate. Entering everything raw gives you a better idea of calorie count, I think.
  • fatzombiegirl
    fatzombiegirl Posts: 29
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    This!
  • cmayfield3
    cmayfield3 Posts: 176 Member
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    Hhhhmmm I am just confused because my RAW weight of the meat was 2293 and my cooked one was 1250. So when dividing portions which one do I use ?

    Step 1. Log it as raw. The end result will be that you have an accurate calorie count for the entire recipe.

    Step 2. When measuring portions, you are just figuring out what % of the entire recipe you are eating. And you've already figured out how many calories in the recipe, in step 1. So in this step just go by what makes sense to figure out how many portions you have. If it's a meatloaf you can probably just slice it up into even slices. If you cut 8 slices, then each portion is 1/8 of the recipe.
  • latysh
    latysh Posts: 29
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    I have been counting entire weight of raw ingredients(each one separately) and then all the nutrition value. After that i add calories in raw stuff and divide by the raw weight. But yesterday when i made meat loaf and difference between cooked and raw so so huge, also all the oil got drained from it while cooking got me thinking......
    So people do you do raw or not ?
  • latysh
    latysh Posts: 29
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    Ok here is my trial.
    Raw ground pork -1146.5 g -3014 calories
    Raw ground beef-1146.5 g -2452
    Bread 51g - 133 cal
    Milk 3/4 cup -120 cal
    Eggs 2 -140
    Bacon bits 2 tblsp -60 cal
    Onion 100g -44 cal

    Total : 5963 cal for 2544 g -RAW

    My total cooked weight is 1250

    So how much is in the portion ?
  • latysh
    latysh Posts: 29
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    bump
  • lmalaschak
    lmalaschak Posts: 346 Member
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    Ack. You're going by grams. So was there a lot of liquid in the pan that accounted for the difference in weight then...?
  • lmalaschak
    lmalaschak Posts: 346 Member
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    Ok, here is probably what I would do for meat loaf. I would poke around online and see if there was any information about what percentage of the calories are "discarded" in the oil/grease that comes out of meat during oven baking. You might be able to find a food called "ground pork, oven baked" or something, that would give you a more accurate count for recipes like this. There are some recipes that are harder to enter because of things like this. If you can't do that I would probably still use the raw weights for your recipe and then maybe just intentionally eat a few extra calories that day, knowing that you haven't had as many as your diary lists. Meat loaf is a tough one. How lean is the meat you used? Maybe next time if you use the leanest meat you can find (I know, expensive!!) the weights won't change as much.
  • lmalaschak
    lmalaschak Posts: 346 Member
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    Also I am looking at your recipe and reasoning that the weight change would also be partially because of evaporation, like the milk for instance. But all of the calories from the milk would still be in the meat loaf even though the liquid would partially evaporate. That would be another reason for so much weight change...

    Your meat loaf lost more weight than I did this week!

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