Struggling to get the carb count right for recipes with dry legumes

Rachelyogi

I have been trying to understand how to get the carb counts right for creating recipes with legumes. I like to go with the weight based measurements so when I input them dry and get the full weight I don't portion it out to servings, rather after its cooked I reweigh it again to get the weight and carb count. What happens is I end up with the carb count being way higher than when I weigh the legumes cooked from dried. I live with diabetes so this discrepancy is actually dangerous. Is there a way to understand this better? the tutorial doesn't explain it enough for me.

Karen_Cronometer

Hi Rachelyogi,

After you weigh the cooked recipe, I would recommend adding water as an ingredient to your recipe to make up the difference between cooked and uncooked weight. This will account for all the water soaked up by the legumes and give you a more accurate carb count for your portions.

Rachelyogi

thanks so much. So how much water would I add? The amount I used to cook the grains? I.e I am cooking 1/4 cup ( 59 grams) sorghum with 3/4 cups water...do I make that into a recipe? and then weigh it again once it cooked? sorry I am so not a numbers person!!! which is really tough living with diabetes .ha ha

robartsd

I would create a recipe. Add your dry ingredients by weight. I weigh the water going in (but you can skip this and just add water to adjust weigt after cooking). After cooking weigh the total weight (I keep a list of tare weights for my pots). Adjust the water to match the cooked weight (I add a negative amount of my custom food, Pure Water).

Rachelyogi

thanks so much but I am still confused when you say adjust the water to match the cooked weight what do you mean? For example. I soaked my red lentils 1/2 cup of lentils to 2 cups water. Soaked the lentils went up to 1 cup. So when I make my recipe which doesn't require extra water as I am making a kind of red lentil falafel. Is it now 1 cup of lentils that goes into the recipe? There will be no extra liquid in the recipe so do I still need to put the water in? I so wish someone would do a tutorial on this for everyone. Its very confusing with diabetes because getting the carb count wrong means issues with high or low blood sugar. Someone else also mentioned in another forum I should way the fafafels raw in chronometer and not reweigh them once they are cooked. Would that work? I am so confused

robartsd

I often assume that all cooking loss is water (not 100% accurate, but whatever). If I made the recipe using ingredients with water content listed and included the water I put in to the recipe, I add negative pure water to make the calculated full recipe weight match the final cooked weight.

Yes, if you're doing a "servings based" recipe and just leave out the water it should be OK. If you want to be able to log your recipe by weight, you need to put in ingredients to make the calculated recipe weight match the final cooked weight some way or another. You could skip measuring the water in the first place, then add enough water to the recipe to make the weight match.