Here's my wife's blog post where she discusses the experimental methodology in more detail than I do in the video: ecngx270.inmotionhosting.com/~bigint5/big-home/how-much-fat-gets-into-your-fried-food/
It's rated pretty well among my videos. Right now its view rate is 6th of 67 videos on my channel, which is pretty good for a video that was a complete one-off filmed on a whim one weekend. As far as why people don't pay attention to this kind of stuff: yeah, I think you're right. It's hard. We all have lots of other stuff to worry about, and tracking food is a pain and a distraction and diverts concentration from other things.
This is genuinely something I've thought about doing and I'm really impressed with your methodology. Genuinely I think this could be a study that could be published
I would presume that real quantitative cooks and/or food labs have done studies like this that are much more systematic and detailed than ours, but thanks very much. So I doubt that just a day's work in our kitchen would be publishable, but it's an interesting thought (we're both academics, although food is neither of our fields). I guess I'll have to do a google scholar search. Glad you liked it!
@@fsodn Yeah, I mean definitely some more rigor and data, but the concept itself is sound in a way I haven't seen really anyone talk about for some reason. I couldn't find very much on Google Scholar either
Thanks for checking in! Please feel free to check out my other videos on flying and my vintage VW and other technical topics, and feel free to send over your friends who are interested as well.
👀 Bumped into an old comment of yours in the wild! Was wondering this for myself. I weigh the oil before and after and just log the resultant(it tended to stay the same for each batch, about 5g of oil per cooked piece in my case..) depending on the food. This is good info to know in this video though. :)
I'm so glad it was helpful, and thanks for watching! Yeah, that's why we did this. We use MFP also and we wanted to know how to enter stuff. That's why we phrased the quantities in the way we did, because we know that MFP knows those sorts of units.
Something interesting to note: spheres have the lowest surface area per volume possible for a 3D shape, which would likely explain why they absorbed less oil. My hypothesis would be that oil absorption would be proportional to the breading/material and surface area. Thinking about it, I can actually see a bunch of really interesting ways of testing this
You make a very good point, that our analysis concentrated on the nature of the surface and not on the surface area. Yes, quite true. We sort of lumped the bulk material characteristics, the surface characteristics, and the surface area together, when those are separate effects. Yes, to your point about making this a published result, we would want to at address that, and maybe even make sure we try to do experiments with material of roughly equal shape and surface area. I guess the output of that would be to quantify the amount of oil absorbed by a certain amount of bulk material *per surface area*. Yes, if we ever do this again, we'll definitely try to do that. Thanks for the suggestion! Glad you liked the video, and thanks for commenting.
Yeah, I feel your pain. But to be fair, it's a tricky measurement to make. Doing it right takes planning and a lot of work. Between filming the opening and closing segments, doing the detailed planning, and the setup, and the cooking+filming, and the clean up, my wife and I spent most of a day on this, and we took up the stove and the kitchen for basically half of the day. So even doing it at a halfway consistent level as we did, it's only feasible on a weekend day when you don't have anything else going on and you're not going anywhere. Doing it in a truly systematic way would take far more time than that. It's not something you can turn on cameras, film for an hour, and put together the rest in editing. It's real work.
Great stuff. I’m curious how much healthier air frying is to deep frying. It’s assumed air frying is better for obvious reasons. But I’m wondering if air frying is not as healthy as people think since it basically absorbs almost all the oil that is sprayed or poured on.
That's a very good question. Experimentation, as always in science, would be the way to find this out. However, since I don't have an air fryer, nor do I have access to one, I don't have a way to do this experiment, at least at the moment. Controlling for uncertainties might be tough for that one. The nice thing about our methodology (weighing the oil pan and drippings before and after) means that we controlled for oil dripping off and water evaporating out of the food. I think it may be tougher to control both of those things in an air fryer. Not to say it's impossible, but someone's going to have to be clever for that to work. Thanks for the comment!
Great video, but i gotta ask, is the food's weight on this list are before fried (not including the oil yet) or after fried (including the oil) ? For example, the cut fried potato (unbreaded), is 118g including oil or not ? If not, so the actual weight of potato is 115 ? If it's not include oil, so i can't count the oil weight after the food getting fried, and therefore i should now the weight before food getting fried ?
Good point. Yeah, we sort of glossed over that. The food is weighed before frying. The weight of the food plus oil from frying will be the sum of the two. This doesn't take into account any water that has boiled off.
That wouldn't make it acurate because the water in the food evaporates. Try baking a potato in oven. Weigh it before and after. It's gonna be much lighter after baking. So the best thing is to measure oil beofe and after baking like they did.
Thanks for making this video!! I love when I come across small quality channels like this. When you say breaded fries, do you mean tossed in flour? That's how I make mine but I personally wouldn't call that breaded. Can you help me clear this up? Thank you!
Hi! Thank you very much for your kind words! (from both of us.) (from my wife, who prepared the food:) Of the breaded items, one was dipped in (beer) batter. One ("lightly breaded") was dipped in egg and bread crumbs. The fat uptake was pretty much the same between the two.
Thanks for watching! For the lines in the table, the food type and amount listed in the left of the line absorbed the amount of oil entered on the right. So in the first line, we cooked 118 g of fry-cut potatoes; they absorbed 5 g of oil. For the second line, we took 229 g of fry-cut potatoes, breaded them, fried them; they absorbed 34g of oil. That answers your "per what?" question. It's separate for each line in the table. The summary statement in the dialog you're referring to was summarizing the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 6th lines in the table. The statement was meant to say that when frying breaded foods, about half a pound of food that you're cooking (225-ish grams) the food will absorb about 2.5 Tablespoons which is round about 34 g. (We were using tablespoons, abbreviated "tbsp", not teaspoons, abbreviated "tsp"). I hope that helps.
Cool video, thank you. I do have one question: is there any significant loss of oil due to evaporation, or is that probably negligible? When I cook with oil I quite often find oily coating all over any nearby surfaces so I know there must be some, but I wonder how much. What do you think and what might be a good way to figure it out?
You're very welcome. It was fun making this. Thanks for watching, and for commenting! Your question about oil evaporation while cooking is a great one! And in fact, one that we didn't think to ask (nor address in the video). My take off the top of my head: Evaporating oil will indeed throw off our measurements. That's oil lost out of the cooking pot that *doesn't* get deposited on the food, but deposited somewhere else in the kitchen instead. And as you say, you can often find residue of it in a kitchen if you do a lot of frying. So yes, I'm now also wondering how much. We had to replenish oil a couple of times among the 7 different cooking rounds that we did. We assumed that most of that was being carried away by the food, but it's entirely possible that some of it was boiled off. One way to try and estimate it would be to have the oil at temp for the same amount of time that you'd be cooking the food, and just weigh the pot plus cooking oil before and after. That leaves out the agitating effect of the food (and the water in the food) would have in kicking the oil into the air. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure how to measure the oil coming off the pot when food is cooking, because a bunch of water boils out of the food when it goes into the oil (thus the bubbles), so that interferes with directly measuring the lost oil. Hmm. We may have to have a think about that. This is a good question, and I'm not sure off the top of my head how to quantitatively measure it. If we come up with a way, we may make a follow-up video. (Be sure to subscribe to see the follow-up; although I don't know that it will come soon. This is going to take some planning.)
did u take into account in regards to evaporation of the oil, maybe you can just boil the oil for a certain amount of time and recalculate the difference before and after to see if evaporation should be added into the equation.
You're right. No, we didn't specifically take that into account in the data that we presented. We were aware of that possibility, and certainly, oil evaporates when it's at cooking temperature. We didn't talk about it in the video because it's a long discussion. Our take is that the point of the experiment is to estimate how much oil *could* be in the food when fried. As in, our estimate is meant to be "it could be as much as X". So for simplicity's sake, we just left it out of our experimentation and our calculations, because any oil that would evaporate would just be assumed to have gone into the food, so the estimates of "food absorbed" would be larger than they would be in real life. However, you make a VERY good point. We could either cook an empty pan for the same amount of time and estimate the loss that way. That's a great idea, and we probably would have done that if we'd thought of it. If we do this again, we'll do that to at least try it out. Thanks for the suggestion!
Hey great video but I have a question. So when you deep fry chicken some moisture comes out of the chicken right? After cooking, should I leave the oil sitting to for it to evaporate before weighing?
We assume that most food is going to have some moisture that's going to boil off (because the frying oil temp is far higher than the boiling temperature of water). There's no really good way to measure that independently of the oil uptake, which is why we didn't weigh the food before and after. What we did was measure the oil pan before and after, and measure the drip tray before and after, so we carefully quantified the oil that when *into* the food. Now some oil will have been lost to evaporation, but our guess is that the measurement we made is still a reasonable guess of the *upper limit* of the oil that could have gotten into the food. My wife's blog post (ecngx270.inmotionhosting.com/~bigint5/big-home/how-much-fat-gets-into-your-fried-food/) goes into this. In short, her example is this: Lets say one set of food we measured that the cooking pan (with oil) lost 25 grams during cooking. Then the drip pan where we set the food for several minutes after cooking gained 5 grams. So the maximum likely amount of oil that the food picked up was around 20 grams. It probably lost a bunch of water that boiled off, but we don't care, because we never measured the weight of the food before or after. (We measured it to find out roughly how much food, but we didn't measure it before and after to try to determine change.) Does that help?
Super interesting, so around 15g oil for 400g chicken without bread. Approx 120 kcals or so. Roughly 2/3 or 100g chicken 🍗😊 Less than I thought actually 👌🤔
That's hard, yeah. Using a digital scale is hard for that reason for anything that takes long. The way I do it instead is to weigh the total thing that I want to know, including its container, and then weigh the after again using the same measurement. So in this case, I weighed the entire pot plus oil plus thermometer on the digital scale as the "before", then after frying, I weighed the entire pot plus oil plus thermometer again, and calculated the difference as the loss. The pot itself weighs the same, the thermometer weighs the same, so they don't matter and the difference is in the oil lost. I hope that helps. Good luck!
Here's my wife's blog post where she discusses the experimental methodology in more detail than I do in the video:
ecngx270.inmotionhosting.com/~bigint5/big-home/how-much-fat-gets-into-your-fried-food/
My question is I don’t understand why videos like this are so underrated. Is that some people don’t want to bother with that or what?
It's rated pretty well among my videos. Right now its view rate is 6th of 67 videos on my channel, which is pretty good for a video that was a complete one-off filmed on a whim one weekend.
As far as why people don't pay attention to this kind of stuff: yeah, I think you're right. It's hard. We all have lots of other stuff to worry about, and tracking food is a pain and a distraction and diverts concentration from other things.
This is genuinely something I've thought about doing and I'm really impressed with your methodology. Genuinely I think this could be a study that could be published
I would presume that real quantitative cooks and/or food labs have done studies like this that are much more systematic and detailed than ours, but thanks very much. So I doubt that just a day's work in our kitchen would be publishable, but it's an interesting thought (we're both academics, although food is neither of our fields). I guess I'll have to do a google scholar search.
Glad you liked it!
@@fsodn Yeah, I mean definitely some more rigor and data, but the concept itself is sound in a way I haven't seen really anyone talk about for some reason. I couldn't find very much on Google Scholar either
Im shocked this really helpfull video has less than 100 views. +1 sub for u my guy ;)
Thanks for checking in!
Please feel free to check out my other videos on flying and my vintage VW and other technical topics, and feel free to send over your friends who are interested as well.
Great video with very useful research, thanks for putting it out!
Glad it was helpful!
U guys are really helpful❤❤❤. Thanks now my weight loss journey is going to be much easier than before.
Great! We're glad you found it helpful!
I’ve been scratching my head on this for a while and this helps so much!! Thanks guys 🫶🏼
Great! We're very glad you found it useful.
👀 Bumped into an old comment of yours in the wild! Was wondering this for myself.
I weigh the oil before and after and just log the resultant(it tended to stay the same for each batch, about 5g of oil per cooked piece in my case..) depending on the food.
This is good info to know in this video though. :)
Thanks so much. I use My Fitness Pal and recently made a batch of falafel. I wanted to know how much oil to add to the recipe. This is perfect.
I'm so glad it was helpful, and thanks for watching!
Yeah, that's why we did this. We use MFP also and we wanted to know how to enter stuff. That's why we phrased the quantities in the way we did, because we know that MFP knows those sorts of units.
Something interesting to note: spheres have the lowest surface area per volume possible for a 3D shape, which would likely explain why they absorbed less oil. My hypothesis would be that oil absorption would be proportional to the breading/material and surface area. Thinking about it, I can actually see a bunch of really interesting ways of testing this
You make a very good point, that our analysis concentrated on the nature of the surface and not on the surface area. Yes, quite true. We sort of lumped the bulk material characteristics, the surface characteristics, and the surface area together, when those are separate effects.
Yes, to your point about making this a published result, we would want to at address that, and maybe even make sure we try to do experiments with material of roughly equal shape and surface area. I guess the output of that would be to quantify the amount of oil absorbed by a certain amount of bulk material *per surface area*.
Yes, if we ever do this again, we'll definitely try to do that. Thanks for the suggestion! Glad you liked the video, and thanks for commenting.
This is an awesome video!! Thanks for making this. Now I can enjoy some fried food every now and then :)
Thanks! Glad you liked it!
Good job.
Thanks! It was a fun collaboration.
5th video in my recommended. I don't even watch videos like these (Still liked the video a lot). The TH-cam algorithm is doing its magic.
Thanks. I'm glad you liked it!
Wooow really thank you, you answered the question I was trying to answer for months ☺️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Great! I'm glad we could help.
Second that, you nailed this
thank you so much for this video!! really helps a lot
I'm so glad you found it useful!
thank you so much for this video!
You're very welcome! I hope it was helpful.
Would love more tests on these, you'd think there would be multiple video's on this on TH-cam but no :(
Yeah, I feel your pain.
But to be fair, it's a tricky measurement to make. Doing it right takes planning and a lot of work. Between filming the opening and closing segments, doing the detailed planning, and the setup, and the cooking+filming, and the clean up, my wife and I spent most of a day on this, and we took up the stove and the kitchen for basically half of the day. So even doing it at a halfway consistent level as we did, it's only feasible on a weekend day when you don't have anything else going on and you're not going anywhere. Doing it in a truly systematic way would take far more time than that. It's not something you can turn on cameras, film for an hour, and put together the rest in editing. It's real work.
thank you so much, it so helpfull.. you're so cool .. two thumbs up
Glad you found it helpful!
Great stuff. I’m curious how much healthier air frying is to deep frying. It’s assumed air frying is better for obvious reasons. But I’m wondering if air frying is not as healthy as people think since it basically absorbs almost all the oil that is sprayed or poured on.
That's a very good question. Experimentation, as always in science, would be the way to find this out. However, since I don't have an air fryer, nor do I have access to one, I don't have a way to do this experiment, at least at the moment.
Controlling for uncertainties might be tough for that one. The nice thing about our methodology (weighing the oil pan and drippings before and after) means that we controlled for oil dripping off and water evaporating out of the food. I think it may be tougher to control both of those things in an air fryer. Not to say it's impossible, but someone's going to have to be clever for that to work.
Thanks for the comment!
Great video, but i gotta ask, is the food's weight on this list are before fried (not including the oil yet) or after fried (including the oil) ? For example, the cut fried potato (unbreaded), is 118g including oil or not ? If not, so the actual weight of potato is 115 ?
If it's not include oil, so i can't count the oil weight after the food getting fried, and therefore i should now the weight before food getting fried ?
Good point. Yeah, we sort of glossed over that.
The food is weighed before frying. The weight of the food plus oil from frying will be the sum of the two. This doesn't take into account any water that has boiled off.
That wouldn't make it acurate because the water in the food evaporates. Try baking a potato in oven. Weigh it before and after. It's gonna be much lighter after baking. So the best thing is to measure oil beofe and after baking like they did.
Thanks for making this video!! I love when I come across small quality channels like this. When you say breaded fries, do you mean tossed in flour? That's how I make mine but I personally wouldn't call that breaded. Can you help me clear this up? Thank you!
Hi!
Thank you very much for your kind words! (from both of us.)
(from my wife, who prepared the food:)
Of the breaded items, one was dipped in (beer) batter. One ("lightly breaded") was dipped in egg and bread crumbs. The fat uptake was pretty much the same between the two.
great video thanks!
We're glad you liked it!
To be clear, I should add that Rebecca and I are married and we live together, and we shot this in our house. Thus no masks or social distancing.
Thanks for the video but :
In the table: 5g of oil per what ?
2.5 tsp of oil =/= 5g
Really don't get it
Thanks for watching!
For the lines in the table, the food type and amount listed in the left of the line absorbed the amount of oil entered on the right. So in the first line, we cooked 118 g of fry-cut potatoes; they absorbed 5 g of oil. For the second line, we took 229 g of fry-cut potatoes, breaded them, fried them; they absorbed 34g of oil. That answers your "per what?" question. It's separate for each line in the table.
The summary statement in the dialog you're referring to was summarizing the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 6th lines in the table. The statement was meant to say that when frying breaded foods, about half a pound of food that you're cooking (225-ish grams) the food will absorb about 2.5 Tablespoons which is round about 34 g. (We were using tablespoons, abbreviated "tbsp", not teaspoons, abbreviated "tsp").
I hope that helps.
@@fsodn it does all the help
Thank you so so much for the video and your kind answer
Cool video, thank you. I do have one question: is there any significant loss of oil due to evaporation, or is that probably negligible? When I cook with oil I quite often find oily coating all over any nearby surfaces so I know there must be some, but I wonder how much. What do you think and what might be a good way to figure it out?
You're very welcome. It was fun making this. Thanks for watching, and for commenting!
Your question about oil evaporation while cooking is a great one! And in fact, one that we didn't think to ask (nor address in the video).
My take off the top of my head: Evaporating oil will indeed throw off our measurements. That's oil lost out of the cooking pot that *doesn't* get deposited on the food, but deposited somewhere else in the kitchen instead. And as you say, you can often find residue of it in a kitchen if you do a lot of frying.
So yes, I'm now also wondering how much. We had to replenish oil a couple of times among the 7 different cooking rounds that we did. We assumed that most of that was being carried away by the food, but it's entirely possible that some of it was boiled off.
One way to try and estimate it would be to have the oil at temp for the same amount of time that you'd be cooking the food, and just weigh the pot plus cooking oil before and after. That leaves out the agitating effect of the food (and the water in the food) would have in kicking the oil into the air. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure how to measure the oil coming off the pot when food is cooking, because a bunch of water boils out of the food when it goes into the oil (thus the bubbles), so that interferes with directly measuring the lost oil.
Hmm. We may have to have a think about that. This is a good question, and I'm not sure off the top of my head how to quantitatively measure it. If we come up with a way, we may make a follow-up video. (Be sure to subscribe to see the follow-up; although I don't know that it will come soon. This is going to take some planning.)
did u take into account in regards to evaporation of the oil, maybe you can just boil the oil for a certain amount of time and recalculate the difference before and after to see if evaporation should be added into the equation.
You're right. No, we didn't specifically take that into account in the data that we presented.
We were aware of that possibility, and certainly, oil evaporates when it's at cooking temperature. We didn't talk about it in the video because it's a long discussion. Our take is that the point of the experiment is to estimate how much oil *could* be in the food when fried. As in, our estimate is meant to be "it could be as much as X". So for simplicity's sake, we just left it out of our experimentation and our calculations, because any oil that would evaporate would just be assumed to have gone into the food, so the estimates of "food absorbed" would be larger than they would be in real life.
However, you make a VERY good point. We could either cook an empty pan for the same amount of time and estimate the loss that way. That's a great idea, and we probably would have done that if we'd thought of it. If we do this again, we'll do that to at least try it out.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Hey great video but I have a question. So when you deep fry chicken some moisture comes out of the chicken right? After cooking, should I leave the oil sitting to for it to evaporate before weighing?
We assume that most food is going to have some moisture that's going to boil off (because the frying oil temp is far higher than the boiling temperature of water). There's no really good way to measure that independently of the oil uptake, which is why we didn't weigh the food before and after.
What we did was measure the oil pan before and after, and measure the drip tray before and after, so we carefully quantified the oil that when *into* the food. Now some oil will have been lost to evaporation, but our guess is that the measurement we made is still a reasonable guess of the *upper limit* of the oil that could have gotten into the food.
My wife's blog post (ecngx270.inmotionhosting.com/~bigint5/big-home/how-much-fat-gets-into-your-fried-food/) goes into this. In short, her example is this: Lets say one set of food we measured that the cooking pan (with oil) lost 25 grams during cooking. Then the drip pan where we set the food for several minutes after cooking gained 5 grams. So the maximum likely amount of oil that the food picked up was around 20 grams. It probably lost a bunch of water that boiled off, but we don't care, because we never measured the weight of the food before or after. (We measured it to find out roughly how much food, but we didn't measure it before and after to try to determine change.)
Does that help?
amazing video
Thanks, glad you liked it!
Super interesting, so around 15g oil for 400g chicken without bread. Approx 120 kcals or so. Roughly 2/3 or 100g chicken 🍗😊 Less than I thought actually 👌🤔
Do you have a video on the sugar and salt picked up when brining chicken?
Nope. This video on fat was sort of a one-off. That's a great idea, though!
trying to do this myself. failed cuz my scale went off and reset while i was frying
That's hard, yeah. Using a digital scale is hard for that reason for anything that takes long.
The way I do it instead is to weigh the total thing that I want to know, including its container, and then weigh the after again using the same measurement. So in this case, I weighed the entire pot plus oil plus thermometer on the digital scale as the "before", then after frying, I weighed the entire pot plus oil plus thermometer again, and calculated the difference as the loss. The pot itself weighs the same, the thermometer weighs the same, so they don't matter and the difference is in the oil lost.
I hope that helps. Good luck!
Guys you're amazing ❤ new subscriber heeere wish for you the best !
Thanks much! Check out my other videos too.
what about fried breads such as donuts?
That would be a great test to do. Let me know how it goes, and I'll link it here!