It’s summertime and most of us are grilling. It’s one of my favorite times of the year and the amount of time we spend grilling cuts down on cooking time for me!
I am currently doing a summer shred challenge to work towards pulling off some of the weight the steroids added over the last year. This particular challenge has a pretty strict food plan and in order to get the best results you shouldn’t deviate much from it.
Well Sunday was Father’s Day and my husband- who is also doing the challenge though less committed- wanted steaks. He picked a filet while the kids and I were eating flank steak.
If you’ve never tried flank steak, I highly recommend it especially if you are feeding a family. It’s relatively inexpensive for the number of servings in a piece and awesome on salads if you have leftovers. The thing with flank steak though is you need to marinate it, usually for a minimum of 2 hours, if you want it to be tender.
I was planning on eating the steak so I got to thinking about the marinade and how much it might affect the shred meal plan I was currently on. We have a favorite marinade that is made up of soy sauce, balsamic vinegar and garlic and I soak the steak in it.
Not wanting to mess up my day with too many sugars or calories I did a little research to see just how much I had to worry about it.
It turns out not that much at all.
Marinades do add some calories to your food being soaked in it but according to everything I could find, it’s very little. Yes, you are soaking the food in a large portion but when you pull it out of the marinade you are discarding most of that liquid when you put it on the grill or in the pan.
The amount left on the actual food is often cooked off in the high heat and you are left with great flavor but very few added calories in the grand scheme of things. For most of us this amount doesn’t need to be factored into your daily calories.
However, if you are preparing for a competition or for a health reason you can figure out just how many calories you are adding to your meals with a few simple calculations.
Two Different Ways to Calculate
Now let me say there are probably more then a dozen ways to calculate it, but these seem to be the easiest way.
First, weigh your marinade before you add the meat to it. Once you are through marinating take the meat back out and weigh the remaining portion of marinade. It’s a ratio game from there to figure out how much the food actually absorbed the marinade.
The other way is to measure the amount of marinade you are using and calculate how much you think stays on the food when you are ready to cook it. You can track this in an app like My Fitness Pal to help keep your macro totals for the day in line.
Again, both these ways won’t be 100% perfect, but it will give you an idea of what you are consuming. For the large majority of us who are just working towards overall health, I wouldn’t worry about calculating the calories. I would focus on making the marinades from whole real foods rather than buying store bought ones which are often heavy with sugar and chemicals.
Side Note- I didn’t have a basting brush for marinades. I had one of the old time bristle ones someone got me as a gift. It got gross and funky and I threw it out because I never felt like I could get it totally clean. For years I used a paper towel, sigh. And like why? A silicone basting brush is literally like $5 for a pack of five. So when I was writing this I hopped on over to Amazon and ordered this set. I can’t wait to try them out.
Our favorite Flank steak recipe:
***I often don’t measure the quantities. I usually just pour and eyeball the amounts now that we’ve made it a bunch of times. You can change it up by adding dry mustard, rosemary etc.
½ cup olive oil
¾ cup soy sauce (I usually use the less sodium)
½ balsamic vinegar
¼ cup Worcestershire sauce
1 T minced garlic
Dash of ginger
Dash of onion powder
Mix together and pour over the flank steak.
We usually make about 3-3.5lbs of flank steak for our family of 6.