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Nutritional value of oil for deep fried dishes

Alexandra de la Tour
We are currently looking at the nutritionals for our menu, any dishes that are deepfried, their calories are thrown way out because the recipe includes the oil that is used for deepfrying.   Do you have any insight on the best way to account for oil in recipes? How do other brands do it? When deep frying an item it will absorb some % of oil – is there a best practice guidelines for this?   @tina
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Anonymous User

Hi Tina,

 

That is an excellent question and a complex one - there is no easy, one size fits all solution to this. There has been a fair amount of research done on this subject, indicating that there are number of variables that affect oil absorption, e.g. the type of food, the state of the food prior to frying (fresh, frozen, partially defrosted), the type of coating used and the temperature of the oil.

 

One option would be to add only the amount of oil into the recipe that you think would be absorbed by the product in question. The disadvantage to this approach is that you might underestimate the cost of the oil. On the other hand, if the frying takes place in a deep fat fryer, e.g. deep-fried, breaded mozzarella sticks, the oil would be used multiple times so would be less costly.

 

However, working out how much oil is absorbed is a tricky thing to do. Unfortunately, weighing a piece of food before and after frying does not give you an accurate estimate of the oil absorbed because water evaporates at a similar rate to the oil being absorbed.

 

A slightly more accurate way of doing it could be to follow these steps:

  1. weigh the non-battered item
  2. weigh the battered item
  3. weigh the fried item

From these steps you know:

  1. the weight of the batter used and the water content within the batter (based on the batter recipe). The water will mostly be replaced by oil
  2. the weight of the item before and after frying, which will give you the amount of extra oil absorbed

 

The other approach would be to specify the full quantity of oil (along with its cost) required to produce the dish, then use ‘advanced nutrition’ to specify only a certain percentage of the oil for the nutrition calculation. The consideration with this approach is that the use of ‘auto-calculate, advanced’ nutrition calculation method for a main recipe will have an impact on the sub-recipe’s yield calculation behaviour:

  1. if a batch recipe is contained within a main recipe…
  2. and the main recipe’s nutrition calculation method is ‘auto-calculate, advanced’…
  3. then the batch recipe’s ‘yield’ calculation method will always reset itself to ‘calculate from raw weight’
  4. also, if a recipe uses the nutrition calculation method ‘auto-calculate, advanced’, its yield calculation method will revert to ‘calculated from analysed weight’ and it will not be possible to use the ‘manual input’ method for recipe yield

 

Finally, to get the most accurate nutritional values possible, you could send samples off to be tested, then manually enter the results into StarChef.

 

I am not sure if this is useful to you but this link to the FSA website sets out tips on how to reduce oil absorption: https://www.food.gov.uk/business-guidance/healthier-catering-tips-for-chip-shops.

 

That is a lot to take in but I hope it is helpful to you.

 

All the best, Sim

 

 

 

 

 

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