Calculating nutrition for sourdough starter
hello! I am a bit new to this, but I use myfitnesspal.com to calculate my recipes. you insert the ingredients and put in the servings and fitnesspal provides you with calories, fat, fiber, carbs, protein, ect. However, I am still not sure how to put in sourdough starter in my recipe for calculation. And what affect does feeding it once a week have on the total calories? say, I just started a starter and I weighed the container. Then I feed it, and weigh the container and grown starter (for example 30 oz) and take out a cup of starter to replace the yeast In a recipe. I weigh the container and starter again and now it's 20 oz. I have 10 oz of starter. Should I calculate that I have 10 oz of flour in my starter I took out or 5 oz of flour and 5 oz of water? Or some other method? Please let me know. Thanks
of starters, which is that it is always changing and alive. Water is evaporating, CO2 is being released, ethanol acids and other compounds are being created, mass is being metabolized creating energy, enzymes are creating sugars from starches and who knows what else is going on. You can't calculate accurately if you don;t what is exactly there.
I would just take the best guess based on what went in deducting out the lost weight over time - before and after each feeding differences.
I don't think it can be accurately calculated without a lab.
The problem with starter is that it changes the composition of its ingredients. Calculating the composition by counting the flour weight it contains would be like calculating the nutritional values of wine by addition of it's constituent grapes.
While the above is correct, I would just put in the flour content into the equation. So if it was 100g of starter at 100% hydration, then just use the nutrition info on 50g of flour (or if mixed flours use those numbers ... e.g. 40g ap flour and 5g WW and 5g Rye). Anything beyond that is going to be too difficult. It will still be close enough.
ETA: The calories should actually be lower because of the sugar being used up, but there isn't a better way ... although there are sites that give nutritional info on sourdough starters (I haven't compared them to just flour).
Not to be a jerk (well maybe...), but why?
Make good bread. Enjoy life.
I can't imagine that the calories/nutrition from your starter are significant in the grand scheme of things.
Tracking what you eat is a very affective way of losing weight or monitoring your food to gain muscle, etc. As far as the significance of starter calories/nutrition, it really depends on how much starter you are using in the bread.
I kind of agree with everybody above. Starter is essentially just a pre-version of bread itself - flour, water, and yeast. The biochemical reactions already mentioned would take place in bread with or without starter because of the activity of the yeast. You add yeast, either commercial or starter, the yeast eats its fill, then you eat the dead yeast and whatever it hasn't eaten - chain of life.
Your best bet probably is like Maverick says, to make your calculations based on the flour mass that comes from the added starter. Because, as mikes mentioned, the changes to the nutritional content of the flour from the action of the yeast in the starter are probably negligible when compared with the overall nutrition of the whole loaf.
There are some extremely learned folks who regularly post here, with backgrounds in laboratory science and experimental process. It would be awesome to hear from them and see if these assumptions are true.
You are right that bread itself will change compared to its ingredients too.
I just re-read the OP and realized this was for Myfitnesspal. I would treat it like a straight dough for the app calculations. The one thing to keep in mind is that you will lose water weight from the bread when baking. So it might be worth weighing the bread afterwards if you want to be more accurate. Personally I wouldn't bother since there are already so many variables.
Good luck with your fitness goals whatever they may be!
more than likely improved the minerals and nutrition of the flour. Happens with quite a few fermenting foods. Take this PDF for example... http://pjbs.org/pjnonline/fin926.pdf note the changes in before and after results.
Kimchee is also value improved after fermentation.
I see that some people are just thinking that it doesn’t matter how many carbs are in a gluten-free sourdough starter. I have three family members who are gluten-free however one is also type one diabetic and I need to be pretty accurate with the carb counts. I will go back and figure out how much of the brown rice flour I have added so far and try to deduct what I took out for my first recipe this morning and see what is left however that does not take into account what was discarded the first few days. If anyone else can add thoughts to thisI I would appreciate it