What is Moisture Loss and why is it significant?
To ensure the accuracy of the nutrition data, there must be accounting for moisture loss during the cooking process. Moisture loss during the processing or cooking will change the per-serving nutrient amounts, essentially concentrating them.
An example:
Let's consider this example using a 100g bread dough recipe. The dough contains 4g of fat and 40g of moisture. When cooked, the dough loses 20g of moisture, reducing its weight to 80g, while the fat content remains at 4g.
Before cooking, a 50g serving of this dough contains 2g of fat. After cooking, the same serving contains 2.5g of fat. This happens because the fat amount which is 4g per 80g of bread, can be expressed as a fraction 4/80, equivalent to 0.05g of fat per gram of bread.
NutriCalc offers three different methods for calculating nutrient cook loss.
Percent Weight Loss (%Weight Loss)
This method is most appropriate if the percentage of moisture lost from the product is already known. For instance, in the example above, the bread dough lost 20g, which is 20% of the recipe. Then the number 20% would be entered. Note: Entering too large of a percent here will result in a negative moisture amount, which is incorrect. For example, if your recipe has 10g of moisture but you enter a 20% loss, your moisture amount will be -10g, so make sure you enter an accurate value here.
Start and Final Weights
If it is possible to weigh the product before and after cooking, enter both values here. NutriCalc will calculate based on the weight loss in grams. For instance, in the example above, the bread dough weighed 100g before cooking and 80g afterwards. Both of these weights would be entered.
Final Percent (Final %)
Enter the final moisture percent of the product here. In the example above, the original moisture was 40g, or 40% of the product. The resulting moisture is 20g, or 20% of the product. Enter 20% here.
Note: Enter the final moisture percent for the product here, not the percent of moisture.
Remove Cook Loss calculation
To remove the cook loss calculation, navigate to the Cook Loss card under the Details tab. Deselect the Cook Loss check box and the nutrient amounts in the Nutrition tab will revert back to their original (pre-cooked) values.
Note: NutriCalc does not correct for other processes, such as fat loss, degradation of carbohydrates, or vitamin decomposition.