How to Calculate Carbs in Homemade Bread

Homemade bread is wonderful in so many ways: you can personalize it with special ingredients, you know exactly what goes in to it, and there's nothing like the smell of freshly baked bread coming from your kitchen urging you to have a hot slice with a pat of butter. But when you are trying to follow a strict diet, you may be hesitant to bake as you will not know the carbohydrate and calorie count. Fortunately, figuring out the nutrition facts for a loaf of homemade bread is easier than you may think. Add this to my Recipe Box.

Instructions

Baking Your Bread

1

Make your bread dough as usual. When making your dough, be sure to follow the recipe exactly as written or write down any alterations in the ingredients. Your recipe should include the flour or oil you will need to roll and shape your bread and any toppings used on the bread, like sesame seeds or eggs.

2

Divide your bread. Whether you are dividing it into loaf pans or rolls, make sure that each loaf or roll is the same size. Some people can be fairly accurate doing this by eye but for a completely accurate method, weigh all of the bread dough and then divide it, making sure that each piece is the same weight.

3

Shape each piece of bread dough as desired and continue with the bread recipe's instructions for cooking.

4




Count how many servings of bread you have; for ease, count each piece or slice of bread as one serving. When slicing loaves, you can start by laying out a ruler or measuring tape and lining up the base of the bread along the ruler. Measure the length of the loaf of bread and decide how thick you want to cut each slice. So if your loaf is 10 inches long, you could cut it into 20 slices. Mark your bread every 1/2 inch with a knife and then cut it with your bread knife.

Figuring out the carbs

5




Using a calorie-counting program such as FitDay, select the option to create a new recipe or custom food.

6

Enter the name of your bread recipe and how many servings your recipe made.

7

Enter your ingredients and the amounts you used for your recipe.

8

Save your custom recipe and you will see the total amount of carbs, calories and fat for the whole recipe.

9

Go to your food log, make sure you have it set to show the carbohydrate content for each logged food, and type in the name of your new bread recipe.

10

Enter a number of servings and you will see the carb content in grams appear along with the calorie count and grams of fat.