Calorie calculation is necessary when following a diet and when drawing up a menu. But at the same time, difficulties may arise, for example, how to calculate the calorie content of a dish consisting of several products?
Instructions
Step 1
First, you need to take into account the mass of water added to the dish, because the calorie content you will count on is 100 grams of the total weight of the dish. In addition, some foods, when interacting with water during the cooking process, change their weight: cereals and pasta are boiled, absorbing water, and when calculating the calorie content, you will only need to take into account the weight of the dry product. Meat, sausages and poultry, on the contrary, are boiled down, giving part of their mass to water. All these changes in the weight of products should be taken into account only if you yourself change the composition of the dish during cooking, for example, drain the water when cooking pasta, and some of it remains in the pasta, or remove bones from the meat, while its weight decreases.
Step 2
For example, the calculation of the calorie content of cooked pasta. Weigh 200 g of pasta, cook until tender. After draining the water, weigh again, remembering to subtract the weight of the dishes. For example, you got 385 g. The "cooking coefficient" (the ratio of the final mass to the initial mass) is 385/200 = 2, 825 in this case. There are two options for using the resulting coefficient: the first - if you use the finished product directly, the second - you use it when preparing a dish with several ingredients.
Step 3
In the first option, you simply divide the mass of your portion by the resulting coefficient and calculate the calorie content for the resulting mass as usual. The second option is more difficult in that you don't know the amount of the product in a serving, since it is mixed with other ingredients. Therefore, it is better to recalculate, taking into account the obtained coefficient, the calorie content of 100 g of the product, and not its mass after cooking. For example, for the pasta from the example above, this value will be as follows: 321 (calorie content of 100 g of dry pasta) / 2, 825 = 113, 63.
Step 4
Example: navy pasta. Ingredients: 120 g pasta, 160 g water, 850 g minced meat, 47 g onion, 12 g butter. Boil them, drain the water. It turned out 375 g. Coefficient of cooking was 3, 125. Add up the calorie content of all other ingredients and divide the sum by their total weight. You will get 129 kcal - this is the calorie content of the finished minced meat. To calculate the final dish, use the mass of dry pasta, and divide the calorie content by the coefficient obtained earlier.
Step 5
Thus, the calorie content of 100 g of cooked pasta in this example will be 102.72 kcal, and the calorie content of 120 g will be 123.26 kcal. Now add up the calories of the already cooked pasta and ready-made minced meat again and divide it by their total weight. So, the calorie content of 100 g of naval pasta will be 126, 43 kcal per 100 g in our example.
