July 28, 2024 - 12:48pm
Calculating carbohydrates and calories per slice in homemade sourdough?
One would never guess that an amateur bodybuilder would bake bread for a hobby, but that's me.
Needing to track my nutrition, how would I track the carbohydrates and calories per slice?
I realize each slice would weigh differently as they are sliced by hand.
Thank you
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You only need averages, I'm sure. I would just add up all the ingredients, their carbs and calories (and protein; you are interested in protein, aren't you?) from label information. Track your slice count per loaf until you know what it runs, and that will be close enough.
If your loaves are not sandwich bread shaped then you can take the size of a slice halfway between the middle and the end and scale your numbers for that.
I wouldn't take the exact numbers too seriously. You don't know how accurate or precise the values on the nutrition labels are, for one thing, nor how much they vary from time to time. I'm sure the values you come up with this way will be plenty close enough for your purposes.
TomP
I imagined that manufacturers used amazing instruments to produce those nutrition labels but no. They just enter the ingredients into a program that looks up the averages in a database and out comes the nutrition label. Did the values change during mixing or baking? They don't care.
You can access the tables online.
Gary
I don't know how true it is any more, but it used to be that a lot of the calorie and nutrition tables were constructed using data measured in the late 19th century. Even if they were accurate at the time, fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats have changed so much that who knows how close those tables come to modern foods.
https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/help.html
I track my foods in Fitbit (for weight management, it was once an issue....). Fitbit has quite a variety of breads to choose from... which can be helpful or confusing. Some of the breads say "PFR" = prepared from recipe. Others are brand specific.
I tend to use one called "100% whole wheat sugar free" bread. You can change it from slices to gm, which is helpful. Since most of the bread I bake is 70-100% whole grain, that one works best for me. They also have a number of sourdough breads among others. When I don't do the sugar free whole grain one, I pick a reputable sourdough brand/bakery from the list and call it good enough.
Mary
It's going to be difficult to be precise by the slice, but if you weigh each serving it's much easier.
Get the nutritional information for all your raw ingredients, then divide by the weight of your whole loaf after it has baked and cooled to get the calories/carbs per gram, ounce, or whatever unit you like. Then, every time you cut a slice, weigh it and use that to get your calories and carbs.
That's exactly what I do. I track my carbs as close as possible to keep the blood glucose down. When I weigh my servings size I can accurately calculate my carbs and any other nutritional information I need.
Gavin.
I've used the Cronometer website to calculate nutritional content of breads and other foods. It uses nutrition databases from the USDA, FDA, some other nations, and user entered data. It will calculate the nutritional content of a food based on the recipe.
I've done this a few times for bread recipes. I leave out the water because it doesn't add any nutrition and I don't want to account for the evaporation. I just base a serving off a fraction of the entire loaf as other members have suggested.