In the series on how to calculate it, we tackle jelly, i.e. the answer to the question: how many calories does ready-made jelly have, how many calories does the powder itself have, and the question that haunts some people: how is it that adding water, which has no calories, to jelly changes its caloric value?
How many calories does jelly with powdered sugar have?
While researching this post, I browsed the entire jelly aisle in popular supermarkets, concluding that "regular" brick-and-mortar stores don't stock sugar-free jellies. All the ones I found in the dessert section were sugar-containing jellies. The only sugar-free jellies found in regular stores are Celiko sugar-free jellies, usually found in the health food section. I also calculated that Guiltfree offers 87 types of sugar-free jellies in 30 different flavors (as of August 1, 2021; we have a chance to exceed 100 by the end of the year!).
Below you will find photos of the most popular sugar-free jellies from different manufacturers and their nutritional values given on the packaging by the manufacturer - as you can see, all manufacturers provide nutritional values per 100g of ready-made jelly and the caloric content of individual products does not differ from each other and is about 50kcal per 100g of ready-made jelly, the sugar content is also very similar - the sugar content in ready-made jelly is about 10%-11%, which translates to 40kcal-44kcal, and this in turn means that
Almost all the calories in the finished jelly come from sugar!
This isn't the subject of this post, so we won't go into detail about how sugar isn't necessarily great, but it's probably dawning on you that if so, maybe it's better to switch to sugar-free jellies and sweeten them with stevia or erythritol?
If you want to prepare jelly according to the package instructions, meaning simply pour the indicated amount of boiling water over it, then of course, there's no problem with the calculations, and the information on the package per 100g of finished jelly is extremely useful. But what if you want to use jelly powder, for example, for a cold cheesecake? How do you calculate its calorie count?
Knowing the caloric content of the finished jelly, knowing how much powder there is and how much water should be added, we can easily calculate the caloric content of the powder itself - it's really easy!
How to calculate how many calories are in powdered jelly – step-by-step calculations based on Winiary jelly
According to the instructions on the package, we should pour 500ml of boiling water over the contents (75g). In the case of water, 1ml = 1g, meaning we should use 500g of water.
So we know that the entire finished dessert weighs 575g
We know that jelly has 52kcal per 100g after preparation, so if we prepare a dessert from the entire package, it will have 52kcal * 5.75 = 299kcal
Since water has no calories, 299kcal comes entirely from the jelly powder, which is 75g.
Since 75g of powdered jelly has 299kcal, we can easily calculate from the proportions that 100g of jelly has 398kcal
To remember: 100g of dry jelly powder has 398kcal
This calculation result is consistent with what one might expect intuitively based on the composition of jelly – since jelly is composed of sugar (a pure carbohydrate, and carbohydrates have 400 kcal per 100g) and gelatin, which is almost entirely protein (and protein has 400 kcal per 100g), combining protein and carbohydrates will yield the same result, approximately 400 kcal. Slight differences may result from the research methodology, ash content, moisture content, and fiber content.
Which jelly has the fewest calories?
By the way, as a curiosity, it can be noted that dry sugar-free jelly, if it is unsweetened or sweetened with a sweetener from the group of intense sweeteners (i.e. stevia, sucralose, aspartame or acesulfame, but not xylitol or erythritol), will have the same caloric value per 100g of dry powder as jelly with sugar, i.e. 400kcal, and almost the only source of calories in this case will be gelatin and the pork protein it contains - however, there is no reason to get too excited and we do not recommend treating jelly as the main source of protein in the diet, because collagen protein is considered by most researchers to be of low value due to poor absorption and a poor amino acid profile.
Another interesting fact is that the lowest-calorie jelly of all is the sugar-free vegan jelly made with agar – agar has stronger binding properties than gelatin, so much less of it is used, and besides, it is mostly fiber, as the graph below illustrates:
Due to the launch of Winiary Jelly 50% less sugar, we decided to take a closer look at the caloric content of jelly with less sugar – after the last story, you bombarded us with questions about why the jelly powder of jelly with reduced sugar content is not less caloric than regular jelly with sugar?
Since sugar has calories, sugar-free jelly should have fewer calories, right?
Not quite…
To explain this, let's break down the composition of jelly—it's quite simple, as jelly consists of gelatin (i.e., protein) and sugar (i.e., carbohydrates). It also contains flavorings, colorings, and citric or malic acid, but in such small amounts that they can be safely omitted from this discussion.
Regular jelly with a 'normal' amount of sugar contains about 75-80% sugar and less than 20% gelatin. If we reduce the sugar content by half, there's a void in the product's composition—less sugar means more gelatin. How does this affect the calorie content of the jelly powder? Almost none, because gelatin, or protein, and sugar, or carbohydrates, have the same calorie content, i.e., 400 kcal/100g! Does this mean that choosing jelly with a lower sugar content is pointless? Of course not!
A larger amount of gelatin in jelly powder means that this jelly is 'stronger', which means that less powder is needed to prepare the same hard jelly - look at the example below, here we have two packages of Winiary strawberry jelly, both of them will make over half a kilogram of ready-made jelly, but the package with a standard high sugar content weighs over 70g, and the jelly with reduced sugar content weighs 39g, so almost half as much, which means that you add less powder to the same amount of water (500ml), which means a lower caloric value of the final finished dessert - of course, provided that you do not sweeten it with sugar 😉
What are the conclusions from this?
jelly powder itself, jelly with sugar, jelly with reduced sugar content and sugar-free jelly based on gelatin have a similar caloric value
Depending on the proportions of sugar/gelatin concentration in the jelly, we use different amounts of powder:
in the case of jellies with sugar, usually about 15g of jelly is used per 100ml of liquid,
in the case of jelly with reduced sugar content, approximately 8g per 100ml of liquid
in the case of sugar-free gelatin jelly, which is almost pure gelatin, 2-3g is used per 100ml of liquid
the lowest calorie jelly remains the vegan jelly made with agar without added sugar
