Weighing food.

SillyCat1975
SillyCat1975 Posts: 328 Member
edited December 2024 in Health and Weight Loss
When you weigh your food and cook it, do you count the calories before it's cooked or after it's cooked. The grams that is.

Replies

  • VintageFeline
    VintageFeline Posts: 6,771 Member
    Depends. If the info is for the cooked weight, I weigh it cooked. If it's raw I make sure to weigh it before. If it's a recipe I generally weigh it raw and then cooked to work out the portions.
  • ahoy_m8
    ahoy_m8 Posts: 3,053 Member
    edited September 2016
    Agree with above. Nominally I weigh all ingredients uncooked and then weigh the finished product. I divide by #servings to get the weigh to serve myself. There can be tons of weight variation in any cooked food, even meats, so more accurate to log the raw weight.

    ETA have you checked out the recipe builder?
  • SillyCat1975
    SillyCat1975 Posts: 328 Member
    I made spaghetti tonight, what I did was I bought lean meat for me, I cooked mine separate and that's where the weighing question came in at. I wasn't sure if I should use the cooked or uncooked hamburger meat for grams. It gets quiet exhausting cooking for 6 people and having to separate my food. I did it before, I can do it again. I was just wondering what you guys thought! :)
  • SillyCat1975
    SillyCat1975 Posts: 328 Member
    What is the recipe builder? Is it a website?
  • cmo246
    cmo246 Posts: 10 Member
    When you add food to your diary, there is an option to add a recipe. You can build the recipe there and then set the number of servings.
  • pebble4321
    pebble4321 Posts: 1,132 Member
    You can do either. Just make sure you look for a database entry that is for "food item, cooked" or "food item, raw".

    And yes, the recipe builder (in the MFP app - up in the menu bar when you click on FOOD on the web, or in the MORE menu on the iphone app) is perfect for home cooking - and it is saved so if you make spaghetti again next week, you can just tweak the ingredients slightly next time and you are ready to go.

    If you are using the recipe builder, the you would use raw weights for the mince, tomatoes, pasta etc then divide by the number of servings.
    Or if you want to be really precise, you can weight the complete finished dish and enter the grams as number of servings (eg 1087g finished = 1087 servings. Then if your portion is 342g, you would enter 342 servings.)
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