Not sure where to post this question, but since I fall into the maintainers crowd thought I might post it here. When trying to figure calories in meat, do you weigh before or after cooked. For example, I'm making ground meat over spaghetti squash tonight and the beef I want to use says raw 4oz 250 calories/21g Protein. If I want a portion of roughly 28g Protein, would that be 5oz cooked?? Kind if confused because I think I read some place that meat shrinks by 25% in cooking. Anybody have an easier way to figure it out?? Thanks!
Doing the math, I get 5 1/3 oz RAW meat to get 28 grams of protein (28g divided by 21grams = 1 1/3 servings x 4 oz serving size = 5 1/3 oz). I have no idea about converting from raw to cooked, though. Since the packaging lists raw nutritional information, measure before you cook. Then you can also weigh after it's cooked to get an idea for next time how much shrinkage you get (so you'll know what you're eating if you cook up a bunch of crumbles ahead of time and just use a little in a meal). How much meat shrinks when you cook it has a lot to do with how much fat and water content it has and how well done you make it. So it depends on the type of meat, the cut of meat, preparation, etc. There's no easy formula that spreads over all meat products.
Usually something like a quarter pound of ground beef is the weight before cooking. Yes, some of the weight gets lost in cooking, but it's water and doesn't change the calories. That's how I've always treated it.
