Are the manufacturer’s nutrition facts labels for cooked or uncooked weight? Last night I cooked a 40-ounce Pork Tenderloin (Salsa Pork Tenderloin). My wife and I ate about 1/3 of it that night. The next day I took the rest of it to work to eat (I was going to be there a while). I weighed it at work and it weighed 16 oz. That would mean that the whole tenderloin cooked weighed 24 ounces.
My question is: when the nutrition facts describe a 4oz portion, do they mean a 4 ounce uncooked /2.4 ounces cooked portion or a 6.67 ounce uncooked / 4 ounces cooked portion?
The Nutrition Facts should say whether or not the nutrition information is for cooked or uncooked by the printed serving size and number of servings. However, this is not required on meat which is governed by USDA, but may be required on marinated meat such as the pork tenderloin you purchased. If it doesn’t have serving size and number of servings, you can still cut the cooked pork tenderloin in the number of servings as determined by the weight of the package which is required.
Meat can lose 25% of the raw weight when cooked, but tenderloin is a very lean piece of meat and would not lose a lot of fat weight. If you overcook a piece of meat, it will be drier and therefore contain less water. Muscle (yours and the pigs) is about 70% water. Usually, 4 ounces of raw hamburger ends up to be 3 ounces cooked. If you are going to eat a steak, a tenderloin would be the leanest steak you could eat rather than a T-bone, porterhouse or sirloin.
If other ingredients are required in the preparation of a packaged food, the manufacturer may list the prepared and unprepared nutritional data like dry cereal and dry cereal with 1 cup of skim milk.
So if you started out with 40 ounces raw, it should weight at least 30 ounces cooked. A reasonable portion of meat is 3 – 4 ounces at one meal depending on the size of the person. So you should cut the pork tenderloin into around 8 to 10 pieces. That portion you took to work should have lasted for 4 or 5 meals. Were you going to be at work for 2 1/2 days?
