How to count family style one pot meals?

CyberTone

hablondi wrote: »

CyberTone wrote: »

Francl27 wrote: »

CyberTone wrote: »

Francl27 wrote: »

CyberTone wrote: »

I then saved the Recipe and added 281 servings of serving size 1 gram to my Food Diary and got 200 Cals. Screen capture below. Everything worked fine and 200 Cals is what I would calculate by hand: 2404 Cals divided by 3100g is 0.711 Cals per serving, times 281 grams is 200 Cals.



I'm not sure what happened when you did it. I do know some people have problems when choosing the Save and Log button. It is best to Save the Recipe; then go to your Food Diary and add the saved Recipe from there.

It's because she weighed the pot before it was cooked, so her serving size won't be accurate.

The OP indicates that she weighed the pot empty, then subtracted.

hablondi wrote: »

So I spoke too soon. I weighed everything and entered into the recipe builder. I then weighed the pot. Then weighed it again with the stuff in the pot. After subtracting the pot weight, I got a total of 3100 grams.

I added up the weight of the ingredients and estimated the ingredients weigh 3400+ grams, so 3100g for the final cooked weight makes sense.

But she weighed everything raw... not cooked.

Yeah, I saw where OP indicated that she weighed the pot plus ingredients before cooking. I added the estimated weight from the list of ingredients as a sum check and got 3430g. I can't resolve that discrepancy without further input from the OP.

OP, was the chicken broth concentrated and you added water? That would throw my estimated ingredient weight off, if the added water was not enough to make a total of 8 cups.

Okay. I just realized that I didn't weight the broth. I just measured it since it was a liquid. Maybe that is where the problem is?

Yep, that would mostly account for my estimated ingredient weight discrepancy.

The total Calories of the ingredients are more important than the weight before cooking the batch. Cooking evaporates water and changes the total weight of the cooked batch (and sometimes I have to add water during cooking). I don't weigh the batch before cooking, because that weight is not relevant to the weight of the cooked batch.

I normally try to let the batch cool a little before weighing the cooked batch. If that is not possible, I've done this enough to know that the final weight loss from evaporation while cooling is about 2%. So if I weigh a batch without letting it cool, I will multiply the final hot weight by 0.98 to estimate the cooled weight.

By the way, well done! You did a lot better than I did trying to figure out how to do it my first time. I did most of my measuring by volume for months. When I got my food scale, I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to do it, and even more trouble trying to get the MFP Recipe Tool to work properly.

T1DCarnivoreRunner

Another idea to build on what has already been said - I weigh not only the empty pot and note it, but I also weigh a cork board to set it on so it doesn't burn the scale. I note the weight of these items so that when everything is totally done, I can put the cork board on the scale and the (now full) pot on top of it, then manually subtract the weight of the cork board and empty pot (previously weighed and noted). The "servings" is then in ounces or grams based on that.

The only challenge I have with this is that my kitchen scale doesn't go high enough. I am single and live alone, but sometimes make big batches and re-heat for awhile afterwards. In those cases, I'll put the cork board and full pot on my bathroom scale (which goes to tenths of lbs.) and convert to ounces manually. For example, if a big batch of chili is 20.3 lbs., cork board and empty pot are 1.7 lbs., then I have 18.6 lbs. of chili. Round to 298 ounces for the number of "servings" in that recipe.