So what’s a good way to measure the calories on store bought marinades and sauces?
The nutrition info gives you the number of calories in a tablespoon or a cup but, it’s not like you’re drinking the damn thing. Not all the marinade you use stays on the food and different foods have different surface areas.
It’s always kind of baffled me.
A “WAG” is Not Much.
As Alfred E. Newman almost said. What? Why worry?
Unless you are dieting and ultra pickie about calories you will have to guess about how much marinde is used and take the proportional amount of calories from the listing on the bottle/container.
Couldn’t you use a measuring cup, and measure the volume you’re going to use to marinate? And then, after marinating your food, pour the leftover marinade back into the cup, measure the volume post-marination, and subtract from the initial volume? Then you’d know the volume of the marinade actually infused into your food, and you could figure it out based on the nutritional data on the bottle.
That’s a good idea, although if you’re picky enough that you care about “cling calories”, it’s probably not accurate for food with any moisture content: the moisture would leak into the marinade, so you wouldn’t know how much you were measuring was just water.
I agree with the first response: unless you’re calorie counting with no margin for error or are using the marinade like barbecue sauce (i.e. cooking in it, not removing it from the food before cooking), I’d call it basically zero and be done with it.
How would you accurately account for the evaporation of water though?
There are very few things in which the calorie count is accurate to the single calorie. The thing (meat) you’re using the marinade on, may have 20 or more calories per serving more or less, depending upon the water or fat content. Measurement devices are not accurate to the single calorie, unless you’re measuring everything by accurate weight.