Food Scale Help

parfia

Hello,

Sorry if this is a stupid question.

I've recently purchased a food scale but I'm having trouble as to how to fit it in. Basically, as me and my husband are out of the house pretty much all day at work and then picking the monster up from nursery, all of our weekly evening meals are prepared in a slow cooker so that the food is ready for when we get home. Therefore, mine and my husband's food is cooked together. He has a larger portion than me. How can I weigh my food if I cannot weight my portion until it has already been cooked?

Thanks

LivingtheLeanDream

Not a stupid question but I can see it feels a challenge for you....

ok so weigh how much meat/fish you are using for the both of you, weigh the veg you will use... using the MFP recipe builder input all ingredients for that meal into it, it will calculate how much one portion is for you and it will also be in the database for you to use again.
I know there will be a bit of guess work in dividing the mixture up, for me I'd ensure hubby got the biggest looking plate.
Weighing the raw ingredients is fine, as you'll basically just be adding water to them in the cooking process.
If you use sauces/condiments add that into the recipe builder too.

You'll find after a while and you've been logging these recipes they'll be handy for future entries

guacamole17

What I do is weigh the crock pot alone, empty, and make a note of that weight.

Then before anything is dished out for a meal, I weigh the crock pot + total batch of the food you made.

Then I subtract that weight minus the crock pot weight and that is the weight of the total meal.

I then divide that weight by however many servings its supposed to be and scope that much into my plate.

Example:

Crock pot plus total receipe/meal = 3000g
Crock pot alone = 2000g
Total meal = 1000g
divided by 2 servings
=500g per serving

edited to add: that way you can have your serving size of whatever you want it to be, while your husband can have whatever serving he wants, no attempting to eyeball it.

I do the same with one pot meals, soup, etc...anything that isn't easily divided.

MelaniaTrump

Use the tare function? Put your plate on the scale. Hit Tare. Then when you add food, it will show how many ounces of food only.

earlnabby

I use my crockpot a lot. I weigh all of my ingredients as I put them in the pot (and enter the info into the MFP recipe builder because I believe it is much more accurate to weigh everything before cooking) and figure out how many servings. When the food is done, I weigh the whole batch in a separate plastic bowl and divide it by the number of servings I determined earlier so I know what each serving weighs. I then return the whole batch to the crock pot and dish up my serving according to the weight.

I have found that some liquid burns off, even in a crock pot, so the weight of the finished dish does not equal the weight of the ingredients put into the pot.

If you have a light weight slow cooker instead of a heavyweight ceramic crock pot (like I do), and your scale goes up high enough, you can weigh the empty pot; put your food in, weighing each ingredient, then weigh the full pot after cooking and subtract the amount that the empty pot weighs. Whether or not you can do this depends on your equipment.

earlnabby

JanetYellen wrote: »

Use the tare function? Put your plate on the scale. Hit Tare. Then when you add food, it will show how many ounces of food only.

OP needs to know how to figure out how many grams is a serving.

Whitezombiegirl

Do the weighing the pot method but log the total grams as 1 g servings e.g 1900 of food is 1900 serings. Then put your plate on the scale and zero. Add food and log as the number of servings by gram e.g 500g is 500 servings of that recipie.

seska422

Weigh the crock pot.

Use the recipe builder with the raw ingredients to get the nutritional information for the whole batch.

After cooking, weigh the cooked recipe in the crock pot and subtract the weight of the crock pot to get the weight of the cooked batch.

Use the weight of the cooked batch as the number of servings. Let's say the whole cooked batch weighs 900 grams. Put that in the recipe builder as 900 servings. (If you like smaller serving numbers, you could divide the weight by 100 and put it in as 9 servings while keeping in mind that one serving is 100 grams.)

Put your plate on the scale and tare it out. Put however much of the batch you want to eat on the plate.

If you got 384 grams of food, that's 384 servings. (Or, if you divided the weight by 100, that would be 3.84 servings.)

amyk0202

I have a large family & big crockpot so my scale won't weigh everything at the same time. I weigh everything as I put it in to the crock & then just add it all together in grams. I usually divide it into 100 gram servings & then I can just portion out however much I'm going to eat. Everyone else just takes what they want.

seska422

amyk0202 wrote: »

I have a large family & big crockpot so my scale won't weigh everything at the same time. I weigh everything as I put it in to the crock & then just add it all together in grams. I usually divide it into 100 gram servings & then I can just portion out however much I'm going to eat. Everyone else just takes what they want.

As things cook, water evaporates off. The total weight of the initial ingredients won't be the same as the final weight after cooking. Even the same recipe won't be exactly the same every time after cooking because a different amount of water may be lost.

The dish will be more calorie dense after cooking so you'll end up eating more calories than you are expecting if you base your serving off the pre-cooked weight and then measure out that amount after cooking.

busyPK

Whitezombiegirl wrote: »

Do the weighing the pot method but log the total grams as 1 g servings e.g 1900 of food is 1900 serings. Then put your plate on the scale and zero. Add food and log as the number of servings by gram e.g 500g is 500 servings of that recipie.

This is what I do and works like a charm.

earlnabby

seska422 wrote: »

amyk0202 wrote: »

I have a large family & big crockpot so my scale won't weigh everything at the same time. I weigh everything as I put it in to the crock & then just add it all together in grams. I usually divide it into 100 gram servings & then I can just portion out however much I'm going to eat. Everyone else just takes what they want.

As things cook, water evaporates off. The total weight of the initial ingredients won't be the same as the final weight after cooking. Even the same recipe won't be exactly the same every time after cooking because a different amount of water may be lost.

The dish will be more calorie dense after cooking so you'll end up eating more calories than you are expecting if you base your serving off the pre-cooked weight and then measure out that amount after cooking.

Yes, I have found this myself. It is important to weigh the dish after cooking in order to find out exactly how much a serving is.