Recipes - Adding up calories and nutritional info?

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When cooking, a recipe has a list of ingredients. If I wanted to find the calories in the recipe would I just add up the calories of every ingredient? Same situation with carbs, protein fat ?

Or does cooking change the number of calories the ingredients originally had?



Best Answer

SAJ14SAJ's answer is very good for the basic case. There are a few exceptions.

First, if you have an ingredient which is partly discarded, it can be hard or impossible to find out what part ended up in your final food. If you deep fry vegetables in oil, you will have to calculate the change in oil weight to find out how much oil got absorbed. Worse, if you soak cookies in milk, the cookies will absorb lots of whey, but no milkfat, and probably no lactose. On the other hand, some of the sugar in the cookies might get leached out into the milk. So, in this case, you can't get a good calculation even if you measure the amount of milk you throw out.

Second, if your cooking process involves fermentation, all bets are off. Yeast and bacteria will eat some of the carbohydrates, but not all. They will convert them to alcohol (which has calories) and carbon dioxide (which does not have human-digestible calories). It might be a small error in something like bread, where there are so many carbohydrates that the amount eaten by the short fermentation is noise. But if you are fermenting liquids with relatively little carbohydrates (kwass, alcoholic drinks), the result will be very different.

Third, alcohol also has calories (about 7 per gram). In most recipes, a part, but not all of it, evaporates during cooking. You can't control well for that, and it can make a significant difference in dishes with lots of alcohol, like coq au vin.

Fourth, the rule will hold for the macronutrients (carbohydrates, protein, fats) and their energy content (calories), as well as some stable micronutrients (predominantly trace minerals like calcium). Fragile micronutrients such as vitamins can break down during cooking. Also, if you are interested in a specific subtype of nutrient, that can also change. For example, you can start out with sucrose (table sugar) and end up with a mixture of glucose and fructose. This will still be the same total amount of carbohydrates, but for some diets, the difference in sugar type is important.




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How do you calculate the nutritional value of homemade food?

Set the food in the container and record its weight in ounces. Divide this number by the servings in the dish to calculate the weight of each helping. Divide the total calories, carbohydrates and other nutrients by the servings to find the nutritional information in each.

Is there an app to calculate nutritional value?

RecipeIQ is a recipe nutrition calculator app that gives you all the information you need to cook and eat healthy. Simply scan, review ingredients, and start cooking.

How do you calculate calories in cooked food?

The best way to estimate the amount of calories in a single serving is to determine how many servings you divided that recipe into and divide the total calories by that number. Then, multiply that by the number of those servings you ate.

How do you calculate calories from nutrition?

To calculate food calories, start by looking at how much protein, carbohydrates, and fat the food has. Then, multiply the total number of grams of protein by 4, since 1 gram of protein is equal to 4 calories. Do the same thing for the carbohydrates, since 1 gram of carbohydrates is equal to 4 calories.



How to Calculate Nutrition Facts || How to Calculate Calories from Nutrition Facts




More answers regarding recipes - Adding up calories and nutritional info?

Answer 2

Use Wolframalpha, it is just adding them up. Your products may not exactly match Wolframs average products, but many labs use average ingredient figures too

As @rumtscho mentions the change or loss in the fermenting/cooking process will affect the final results. There have been books published with tables showing the changes caused by fermentation and chemical reaction

It produces pretty labels, all ready to go!

e.g. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100g+flour+and+100g+butter+and+50g+sugar

Recipe nutritional label

Answer 3

Yes, analytically, you would sum that calories for each ingredient.

In theory, cooking may slightly change the the caloric content of some ingredients, but given that there is a huge level of variability in natural ingredients (small versus large apples, and so on), an uncertainty of accurate measuring in execution, and so on, this is likely to be in the noise for you.

If you truly need high precision, you will need to consult food scientists for the detailed methodologies.

Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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