Do you ever get better at calculating servings?

Kollane

Made food - ingredients:
500g whole wheat penne pasta
810g minced meat (pork-beef)
280g canned peas
400g kidney beans in chilli
500g tomato sauce

Since I can't guess the servings, I put 8. It was not 8. It was way more. Somewhere around 14 I'd say. I didn't bother changing it, as it'd have thrown off my meals and calories. 556 calories for a massive portion was okay.

Will I ever get better at judging, how many servings the food contains? Is there a way to calculate it?

kommodevaran

You don't really "calculate" - at any rate, you don't "guess" - number of servings. When you use the recipe builder, MFP adds up the total calories in all the ingredients, and then you serve yourself an appropriate amount, based on how many calories you want to eat for your meal. If it's going to be dinner, maybe you want your meal to be around 600 calories, if it's lunch, maybe you want around 400 calories. If the whole thing is 2400 calories, you get 6 400 calorie lunches or 4 600 calorie dinners out of it.

If you want to have different portion sizes, weigh it (net weight, and after it's cooked, important). Let's say it weighs 1230 grams. Then you can tell MFP that the recipe is 1230 servings. When you serve yourself, you weigh your portion and enter the amount of grams as number of servings - for instance, you take 456 grams and enter 456 servings. MFP calculates the correct number of calories for you.

Rusty740

This is something MFP could do better. What I do is build the whole thing and put how many calories total. Then weight the whole thing. Then measure out how much you think someone would eat, say 1 cup and weight this. Then you just divide the total by how much that one cup weighed. It's a bit of work but if you make the recipe once, it's worth it. You just have to put some more information in the title of how much (1 cup/500 cals, or something) the serving is.