I'm doing a lot more serious cooking from basics at the moment (the joys of suddenly being made redundant!) and am unsure of how to calculate carb, calorie, fat etc values for dishes from raw ingredients.
For exmple, currently simmering on the stove is a vast seething cauldron of rendang, a malaysian beef and coconut stew. The main calorie-containing ingredients when raw are:
2 kilos of stewing steak
1.6 litres coconut milk
200 g red pepper
300 g onion
120 g resh ginger.

All other ingredients are dry spices - cloves, chillis, lime leaves, cinnamon stick, etc

My calorie counter gives a value for stewing steak, lean and fat, stewed ie already cooked. How do I reconcile this with values for raw ingredients? Basically, this cooks down into a semi-solid meat sludge - it simmers for 4 hours.
I notice that quite a lot of foods have a different carb count when cooked from raw, but there are lots of different ways of cooking. What if the book says "Boiled" for something (in this case, cabbage) and I microwaved it then baked it into a meatloaf.
I'd be happy with a url pointing me in the direction of more reading.
Zan

When I calculate recipes, I use the raw counts and then divide by the number of servings. The count on vegetables does change when cooked, but it's because they lose moisture content and shrink. I'm not an expert in this, but I don't believe that carbs or protein can disappear in the cooking. They only become denser. If you are cooking a piece of meat, the fat content can change because fat will melt away and be left in the pan.

HTH,

Karen

Thank you Karen
Will try applying that concept. Another problem I had was the coconut milk. It came in tins with the content by volume, ie, millilitres. But all the carb counts I can find are by gram. Should one infer that they are equating millilitre with gram? one thousandth of a litre with one thousandth of a kilo? What about the water content, which is surely included in the volume measurement?
Zan

Do you mean that the coconut milk is measured by grams?

Here's the info from the database in Low-Carb Tools at the top of the page. An excellent database I might add.

For 1 cup of canned coconut milk which = 240 ml:

Total Carbohydrates 6.35 g
Dietary Fiber 0.00 g
Total Protein 4.57 g
Total Calories 445.22
Total Fat 48.21 g

Karen