Calculating a recipe's carb factor
The glycemic factor of a recipe consists in adding up the total quantity of sugar of each ingredient used in a dish and to divide that number by the recipe’s total weight. This then gives us the percentage of sugar for any given gram of the dish, which can be used to approximate the quantity of sugar in a person’s desired portion.
This method is useful to provide an approximation when calculating the amount of sugar in a dish, especially if you’re doing that recipe often.
Two things to note:
- The approximative glycemic factor of the recipes calculated will be dependent on your consistency when doing the recipe.
- For example, if you replace an ingredient with an other or if you change the quantities in your recipe, you will need to recalculate the glycemic factor as they would differ from the original time you calculated it.
- Any other food not part of the calculated recipe has to be weighted and accounted for in the final countdown of sugar in the whole meal.
- For example, if you calculated the glycemic factor for a butter chicken recipe you do often and you have rice on the side, the rice has a different factor and has thus to be calculated separately.
Method
Basically, the recipe is relatively simple:
- You have to calculate the total quantity of all ingredients’ sugar and divide it by the total weight of the recipe.
But how do you calculate the total quantity of sugar in the recipe?
The guide provided on Diabetes Quebec offers a good way to understand the nuances of the carbohydrates count: Calcul des glucides avancé
For example, for the fictive ingredient below, you can identify the following information:
Source: Calcul des glucides avancé, Diabète Québec
For a quantity of 87g of that ingredient, there are 18g of carbohydrates and 2g of dietary fibers.
For the purpose of this exercise, dietary fibers have to be subtracted so that gives a final count of 16g of sugar to count for the recipe.
The glycemic factor of that ingredient alone would be 16g / 87g:
0,183908046 (you can round up here and use 0,184)
If that was the glycemic factor for a recipe, you could weight the amount of it that you would be eating and multiply it by the factor.
For example, if you had 200g of that ingredient in your plate, that would essentially count as 200g * 0,18, which is about 36,8g of sugar.
For the whole recipe, you will need to take proper notes of each the quantity of each individual ingredient.
When ingredients are in volume (ml, cups, etc.), you may need to do a little more calculating but the principle stays the same. This is mostly the case because the nutritional facts are not in weight but rather in volume, while the amount of sugar provided is still in grams.
But before going too far in your cooking, make sure you have also taken note of the weight of the final recipient where your recipe will sit in the end. The idea here is that most recipes need you to use a variety of tools and receptacles, like pans, cauldrons, etc. and you really want to have the final weight of the recipe, not the recipe plus the final recipient because that would give you a skewed factor.
When you know the individual quantity of each ingredient, you can add them all up so that it gives you the total amount of sugar in the recipe.
You can then cook the meal and weight the final dish, before taking any from it, otherwise you once again skew the result.
Finally, you divide the total quantity of sugar by the weight of the recipe and you obtain the glycemic factor for that dish.
It is a lot of work and that’s a good reason to not want to do the exercise every single time. On the other end, you have a pretty accurate idea of the amount of sugar in your recipe, which is often not the case when eating in a restaurant or at someone else’s place.
I have started listing recipes we often do at home. As for anything on this site, these are provided as is and there are no guarantees of exactitude. I can’t recommend enough that you do your own calculating to validate that the information is accurate.