Contents
The calorie content of the finished dish is usually indicated in the cookbook, however, not always and not everyone has the opportunity to look there. Moreover, when drawing up your individual menu, you will have to make several bookmarks. Therefore, it is worth mentioning what are the general principles of calculating calories in a future dish, how to correctly determine the calorie content of a dish.
All products change volume
During the cooking process, all products are fried or evaporated. Cereals, meat and vegetables change their volume, but their calorie content remains the same:
- Meat, poultry, fish lose moisture during cooking and the volume decreases;
- Vegetables also lose moisture, and with it they decrease in volume;
- Cereals and pasta, on the contrary, absorb moisture – their volume increases.
Calorie content remains the same. For example, let’s say you decide to cook chicken breast. You took 200 g of meat with a calorie content of 220 kcal, cooked it, but at the output you got only 150 g of the finished product, but its calorie content did not change – 220 kcal.
Similarly, you decided to cook buckwheat. We took 100 g of buckwheat, calorie content of 329 kcal, and 200 g of water. The groats absorbed water, increased in volume, but remained with the same calorie content – 329 kcal. If you took not 200, but 300 g of water, then the volume of porridge would become even larger without changing the calorie content.
That is why, after you have counted raw foods and prepared a dish, you need to weigh it and count it. Or just calculate in percentage How long you ate. Suppose that you cooked 100 g of buckwheat, but only eaten a third. To do this, divide the calorie content of the finished dish by 3: 329/3 = 109,66 (rounded up to 110) kcal. In this case, the finished dish does not need to be counted, since you have eaten only a third of it. There is no need to recalculate the calorie content of the finished dish that you are going to eat completely. It is enough to count its raw ingredients.
Calorie calculation of a complex dish
If boiling porridge and cooking meat is easy, then what about complex dishes that are prepared for the whole family? Let’s take a look at simple examples.
Calorie calculation of cutlets
Let’s say you decide to make cutlets beloved by your household, for this you will need:
- 1 egg – 86,35 kcal;
- 0,5 kg of beef – 935,0 kcal;
- 100 g of milk – 64,0 kcal;
- 100 g of white bread – 242 kcal;
- 20 g of garlic – 28,6 kcal;
- 50 g of onion – 20,5 kcal;
- 100 g of vegetable oil – 899 kcal.
Total Calories: 2275,45 kcal.
Total weight of products raw: 925 gr.
We calculated the calorie content of the required amount of food. To do this, we used the Calorie Table and Recipe Analyzer on our website. Now you can start cooking the cutlets themselves.
All patties will have 2272,45 calories. To find out how many calories are in 1 cutlet, you just need to divide the total calorie intake by the number of cooked cutlets. However, if the size of the cutlets is different, then this method of calculation is not the most suitable.
More precisely, calculate the calorie content and bju per 100 grams of the finished product. To do this, do not eat cutlets until you have done all the calculations. So, after the patties are cooked, see if there is any oil left. If there is still oil, measure its volume using a measuring container (get used to using this container), and subtract the calorie content of the remaining oil from the total.
Let’s say you have no butter left at all, the weight of the cutlets is 700 g. Now you need to calculate how many calories are contained in 100 grams of your cutlets. To do this, we will divide the total calories by the weight of all cooked cutlets.
Let’s use the formula:
Calorie content of all raw ingredients / weight of the finished dish = calorie content of 1 gram of the finished dish
Calorie content 1 gram x 100 = calorie content 100 g of the finished dish
It turns out 2275,45 / 700 = 3,25. This is how many calories are contained in one gram of the finished dish. And in 100 grams of cutlets – 325 kcal. The calculation is ready. Add your product to the base of the calorizer. Next time you cook, use the same amount of ingredients so you don’t have to re-calculate everything. It remains to weigh 1 cutlet and write it down in your diary.
Calorie calculation of soup
You can also calculate the calorie content of a serving of soup. To do this, you need to weigh all raw vegetables, and then calculate the calorie content of each of them, it can also be found in our Calorie Table.
Then the total volume of the prepared soup is measured, since the water usually boils away during cooking, and then, some like the soup thicker, while others prefer it thinner. The total calorie content of all products is divided by the resulting volume of cooked soup, this figure is further multiplied by 100. So we can calculate the calorie content of 100 ml of the resulting soup.
Formula:
Calorie content of all raw ingredients / volume of cooked soup = calorie content of 1 ml of soup
Calories 1 ml x 100 = 100 ml of soup.
Calorie calculation of a side dish
The calorie content of a portion of pasta is calculated by the tab, in other words, there is as much nutritional value in ready-made pasta as in raw pasta. The volume is changing, not the calorie content of the common dish. But the calorie content of the dish changes per 100 grams.
To find out the calorie content of a serving of a simple dish, divide the number of calories by the portion eaten:
Prepared 100 grams of pasta, and ate half.
Calorie content of pasta / 2 = calorie content of the portion eaten.
If you need to calculate the calorie content of mashed potatoes, take into account the calorie content and weight of potatoes, butter, milk, as well as the weight and volume of food. Let’s say you have cooked 0,5 kg of potatoes (this is the weight of the finished one), you added 100 ml of milk, 20 g of butter to it. Thus, the total weight is 620 g.
Now you can look at the calorie content of products in the tables, and then make a calculation. To do this, you need to divide the total calorie content by the weight received, so you will know how many calories are contained in one gram of puree. The resulting figure is multiplied by 100 and we get the calorie content of a serving of mashed potatoes equal to 100 grams. Everything is simple, the main thing is not to forget to write down the data in your Personal Account, if you still need to contact them in the future.
Two mistakes when calculating calories
It is very easy to make a mistake when calculating the calorie content of dishes. A typical mistake most people make is to focus on the weight of the food they cook. The base of the calorizer in the Personal Account contains a huge number of recipes, but you never know exactly what ingredients a particular dish is prepared from. Choosing “porridge with milk”, you do not know How long milk the author of the recipe added to it. Choosing a “vegetable salad with butter”, you won’t even roughly guess what vegetables it contains and How long oil is in it. Similarly, when choosing a simple “buckwheat on water”, you cannot know How long water it was boiled in. The calorie content of these dishes is good if you have a snack somewhere, but do not know how to write down the calorie content in your diary. In this case, you can safely use the calorie content of ready-made dishes.
Always calculate the weight of dry (pasta, cereals, flour) and raw (vegetables, meat, fish) products, and use ready-made meals only from the base of your own recipes, provided that you take the same amount of ingredients each time to prepare them.
The second mistake is snacking cooked. For an accurate calculation, first you weigh the raw ingredients, and then the finished dish. If you start snacking ahead of time, eat a cutlet or a bowl of soup “to try” or out of boredom, then you will not be able to accurately calculate its calorie content and run the risk of overeating.
Show willpower, understand that if you have asked yourself all these calculations, then you need it. Food will not run away from you, eat later when cooked. But you will know exactly the calorie content of the dish and your portion.
So, you learned today from our article how to correctly calculate the calorie content of a finished dish. We gave examples of cutlets, soup, pasta, mashed potatoes. We hope you can now easily calculate the calorie content of any dishes!