Calorie counting and analysing recipes

  • Hi all.

    I'm making a beef curry tonight in my slow cooker (yum yum!). Since I'm counting calories, I went ahead and analysed the recipe.

    2 tablespoons olive oil
    1 1/2 pounds chuck steak
    1/4 cup flour
    2 medium onions, sliced
    1 can diced tomatos
    3/4 cup beef broth

    (plus spices, but I don't worry about analysing those)

    I analysied this at caloriecount.about.com. There's no way that one serve of this could have 375 calories and 19 grams of fat (6 serves). The beef that I'm using is trimmed of all fat (before cooking and during eating, I hate the texture of fat!). Unfortunately, I can't find any beef nutritional information that doesn't have beef that's been trimmed to 1/4" fat.

    Do any of you have problems with this kind of analysis- when you count up all the calories in a recipe and divide by the servings, but not only do you not eat everything, but there's extra fat left over? How many calories do you substract? How much fat? Should I just take this calorie count with a grain of salt, so to speak?
  • I put the recipe into my calorie counter livestrong.com/thedailyplate and I got 258 calories amd 11 grams of fat. I don't know exactly the cut of meat you used, but I used beef chuck steak in the recipe calorie counter. I don't know how we got such different numbers.
  • Quote: I put the recipe into my calorie counter livestrong.com/thedailyplate and I got 258 calories amd 11 grams of fat. I don't know exactly the cut of meat you used, but I used beef chuck steak in the recipe calorie counter. I don't know how we got such different numbers.
    The cut of meat I used is the gravy beef, which I'm sure is either round, chuck or blade steak; I usually get my packs of blade steak labelled, but different butchers call them different things.

    I'm going to take the caloriecount.about.com numbers, but since I left out a heap of ingredients (flour, olive oil and one onion), I might just get close to 300 calories.

    Thanks for taking the time to see what it another analysis showed.