Water and fat loss occur when cooking meats, causing nutritional and density changes. These changes depend on the meat type, cut of meat, and cooking method. Read on to see how to handle in Galley.
How to build recipes in Galley to account for meat shrinkage:
- Create an ingredient for the raw version of the meat you would like to use in a recipe. For example Beef, Raw, 80/20. For this article, the meat shrinkage we are calculating will be for pan-browned ground beef (80/20) which will be used in a recipe for Beef Tacos.
- Next, using the integrated USDA database search in Galley, find the closest match for the raw version and select it to pull in the nutritional values.
- Create a sub recipe for the cooked version of that meat. In this example, we will call it Cooked Ground Beef (80/20) 100 g.
- Visit the USDA's Food Data Central website and search for the cooked version of the meat you are using. Be sure to select the ingredient that best matches the cooking method you use for the meat. In this example we will use Beef, ground, 80% lean meat / 20% fat, crumbles, cooked, pan-browned.
- Navigate back to Galley and open the nutrition tab of the cooked meat sub recipe you created in step 3. Enter the nutrition values for 100g of the cooked meat from the USDA database into the nutrition tab of the cooked meat sub recipe in Galley.
- Adjust this recipe yield according to the specific cooking yield for the type of meat used. USDA Reference
Completing this step accounts for the water and fat loss that occurs during the cooking transformation of raw to cooked. In the example of pan-browned ground beef 80/20, 20% is lost, or rather, the yield percentage is 80%. Enter 80g into the cooked ground beef sub recipe recipe yield field. - Now create a new recipe that uses the Cooked Ground Beef sub recipe. For example, Beef Tacos.
- When adding the Cooked Ground Beef sub recipe as a component to the Beef Tacos recipe, to calculate the amount of cooked ground beef to use in the recipe, take the raw amount of beef/meat called for in the recipe and multiply it by the yield percentage for the particular cut/type/cooking method of meat (see step 6).
Ex: The recipe calls for 16 oz raw beef x 80% yield= 12.8 oz cooked ground beef.
Enter 12.8 oz into the component quantity for the Cooked Ground Beef 80/20 in the Beef Taco recipe. - Navigate to the All Ingredients table for the recipe (i.e.- Beef Tacos). Click the Usage drop-down for the ground beef ingredient. Notice the table shows the total raw amount of ground beef used in the recipe on the right-hand side. On the left-hand side, you will see the cooked output amount in parentheses. For example, 16 oz of raw meat will yield 12.8 oz of cooked ground beef, ensuring that purchasing, production, and nutrition information are accurately performed and calculated for this recipe.
