How many calories does a home-made marinade add

caloriesmarinade

I'm planning on marinating my chicken legs with Tabasco sauce.
I have read that a marinade should be one part lemon juice and 3 parts olive oil.

I'm going to be using two skinned chicken legs, lemon juice, extra virgin olive oil and Tabasco sauce

The reason I want to marinate the chicken legs is because I will be eating them on the go and wont have time to add the Tabasco sauce to them yet I still want them spicy.

So basically I'm wondering how many extra calories could I be talking for each chicken leg.

Thank you.

Best Answer

Oil which ends up being eaten, no matter if it comes from deep frying, marinating or just adding it, clocks in at 7-9 calories per gram of oil. If you add any sugar or thick syrup, calculate around 4 calories per gram. Tabasco sauce, being mostly vegetables and vinegar, is truly trivial in calories.

If you weigh the oil (and sugar if using) going into your marinade, and also weigh all your finished marinade, you can roughly calculate the calories per g of finished marinade: (("grams oil"*8)+("grams sugar"*4))/"total weight".

Now divide the total weight of marinade (minus the weight of marinade wasted -weigh it!) by the number of portions, and multiply with the calories per gram factor you calculated above.

Chances are that oil will penetrate less than other marinade ingredients, which could end up with there being a bit less calories in the finished food than calculated.