Counting calories of soup. Serving Size?

jraymond

When making homemade soup or chili, the recipes frequently will give calories per serving and say that there X servings. But really, it depends on how much liquid cooks out. Is there a standard size for a serving of soup? Should I assume 1 cup?

Francl27

Weigh it all and enter the number of grams as servings. Then weigh your portion and enter that as the number of servings that you ate.

seska422

Francl27 wrote: »

Weigh it all and enter the number of grams as servings. Then weigh your portion and enter that as the number of servings that you ate.

This.

In order to weigh it all, weigh your pot before you cook. After you cook your soup, weigh the pot with the cooked soup in it and then subtract the weight of the pot to get the total weight of your soup.

not_my_first_rodeo

I thought you had to use ML for liquids. Some soups are going to be thicker than water. How can you use grams? Or was I misinformed?

jvcjim

i weigh all my ingredients before they go in, including the liquids then divide the total grams by the number of servings. then when eating i weigh my bowl, then add however many grams of soup and since i save my recipes in mfp i include the number of grams per serving in the recipe title for future reference.
the only thing that is going to cook out is water and really not all that much of that either.

Spliner1969

I make my usual recipes, then enter the ingredients as I add them into an MFP recipe. Once I'm done with chilli or soup I figure 2 cups is a serving size (which is what our soup/chilli bowls hold). So the first time I make it, I'll use a 1 cup measuring cup and scoop out two scoops at a time into a second container (drives my wife crazy when she catches me doing this) to count how many servings my recipe makes. Then I put it all back and we use it normally. That way I now have my recipe in MFP which can be repeated exactly with the same ingredients, and I know how many calories per serving. Once my wife figured out what I was doing she doesn't yell at me for dirtying two cook pots the first time I enter it into MFP.

The only drawback to this is that there is no way to share a recipe between two people on MFP, so I have to go back, and re-enter the recipe for my wife on her device/phone/account. It's tedious and annoying. That's probably the biggest thing I hate about MFP is not having the option to export/import recipes by other users made by MFP. The second thing I hate is that when you import a recipe from a website you get a link in the recipe to the original website with instructions, along with a nice picture of the completed recipe. There's no way to do that when entering your own manually that I have found.

I'm going to let my subscription to MFP expire this month, and I probably won't re-up it until they add those features. I'll stick around on the free version instead.

seska422

not_my_first_rodeo wrote: »

I thought you had to use ML for liquids. Some soups are going to be thicker than water. How can you use grams? Or was I misinformed?

You can weigh non-water liquids as long as the nutritional info is in grams or you know the density so that you can convert.

When you make your own soup, you record the nutritional info so that you know the calories for the whole soup. You can then weigh the whole soup to get the weight in grams. Now you have nutritional info for grams.

Francl27

I tried to do by volume once but when I added all my servings in the end I was 2 servings off or something... weighing is SO much easier.

lynn_glenmont

jraymond wrote: »

When making homemade soup or chili, the recipes frequently will give calories per serving and say that there X servings. But really, it depends on how much liquid cooks out. Is there a standard size for a serving of soup? Should I assume 1 cup?

I would log all the ingredients in the recipe builder and weigh the finished amount and use weight in grams as the number of serving.

But , if you actually trust the nutrition information provided with the recipe, you're mistaken about it depending on how much liquid cooks out when the nutrition information is given for 1/X servings. It would only matter if it said a serving is a cup or 120 grams or something. 1/X of the recipe will have the same calories, fat, protein, etc., regardless of how much water has evaporated during the cooking process, because the entire recipe (X servings) still has the same calories, fat, protein etc.

You'll have to figure out the volume or weight of the entire pot of finished soup so you can determine how much 1/X is. For something like rice or quinoa, if I make four servings, I eat 1/4 (by weight) the first night, 1/3 the second, 1/2 the third, and the remainder on the last night. That way I don't have to worry about water loss during cooling, heating, storage.