Creating recipes

KateMainer

I created a salad dressing (happy to share it) and it doesn’t allow me to enter the serving size. I have to then add it as a food. I enter all the ingredients as recipe and it only asks how many servings. Am I not supposed to enter it as a recipe?

AnnPT77

KateMainer wrote: »

I created a salad dressing (happy to share it) and it doesn’t allow me to enter the serving size. I have to then add it as a food. I enter all the ingredients as recipe and it only asks how many servings. Am I not supposed to enter it as a recipe?

You can enter it as a recipe. I think it's that arithmetically a serving size implies a number of servings, and vice versa. For a simple example, if I make a recipe that makes 2 pounds of macaroni and cheese, and I say it has 4 servings for the recipe, that implies that each serving is 1/2 pound in size. Same deal if I'm using volume measures, like if I make 8 cups of soup, and say that it's 8 servings, that implies 1 cup servings.

Usually, even though I'm USA-ian, I weigh food in grams (more fine-grained measurement so more precise). What I most often do is weigh the finished product, and use the number of grams as the number of servings. Then, when I eat the food, I weigh out however much I want to eat (say 223g) and log it as 223 servings. That looks kind of weird, but is really easy. (If you put a big number in the number of servings in the MFP recipe builder, it will give you some kind of "did you really mean 1257 servings?" message, but if you say you meant it, it will store it that way.)

Every once in a while, I make something that's annoying to weigh when it's done. (Yeah, I could if I really, really wanted to. 😉) Let's say it's a pan of lasagna. I just cut it in 16 sections, call it 16 servings, and don't worry too much about how much weight/volume is in each serving. I figure the overs/unders will average out, over a long timespan of logging. It's been working OK for 5+ years now, so I think that's a solid theory.

Hope this makes sense!

goal06082021

I'm just here to second what Ann said. I'm also American but I do something similar - I weigh my entire finished dish in grams and base the number of servings on that, recording the name of the dish as "[food] per g/per 10g/per 100g" depending on what makes the most sense. A sauce or dressing, for instance, would probably be per gram; a main dish like a stew or soup might be per 100g; a side dish like a salad, or the prepared components of my breakfast burritos (scrambled eggs and roasted vegetables), are usually per 10g. "A serving" is 1g, 10g, or 100g, whatever I put in the recipe name. It might look or feel weird to log "120 servings" of something, but the math works out in the end.

rosebarnalice

Sometimes when I make something like salad dressing where I really don't know how many servings there will be, I'll just get a weight for the entire recipe, enter it as "1 serving" then when I log, I'll measure how much I take and enter it as a fraction.

Example: I made a dressing recently where the total weight was 661 grams, which I called 1 serving in the recipe builder.

Then when I actually used it, the amount I used weighed 72 grams. So 72/661= 0.1089, so I logged what I used as "0.109 serving".

Works great! Oh, added tip: I put the total weight in the recipe name so I don't forget (e.g. "spicy mango curry dressing 661 g")

MsCzar

When I make my no-bake almond/nut butter/chocolate oat bars, I set the empty bowl on my digital scale (set to grams) and add the ingredients one at a time - zeroing via the tare function after each addition and noting the amounts. Then I enter the entire recipe at MFP to get the calorie count for the finished bars. It then shows up as home made almond bars in My Foods with 1 serving as 143 calories. I do this with every batch I make since I like to eye in or swap out my ingredients.

You can do some simple math and/or Imperial:Metric conversion to figure out a serving size that works for you.

KateMainer

AnnPT77 wrote: »

KateMainer wrote: »

I created a salad dressing (happy to share it) and it doesn’t allow me to enter the serving size. I have to then add it as a food. I enter all the ingredients as recipe and it only asks how many servings. Am I not supposed to enter it as a recipe?

You can enter it as a recipe. I think it's that arithmetically a serving size implies a number of servings, and vice versa. For a simple example, if I make a recipe that makes 2 pounds of macaroni and cheese, and I say it has 4 servings for the recipe, that implies that each serving is 1/2 pound in size. Same deal if I'm using volume measures, like if I make 8 cups of soup, and say that it's 8 servings, that implies 1 cup servings.

Usually, even though I'm USA-ian, I weigh food in grams (more fine-grained measurement so more precise). What I most often do is weigh the finished product, and use the number of grams as the number of servings. Then, when I eat the food, I weigh out however much I want to eat (say 223g) and log it as 223 servings. That looks kind of weird, but is really easy. (If you put a big number in the number of servings in the MFP recipe builder, it will give you some kind of "did you really mean 1257 servings?" message, but if you say you meant it, it will store it that way.)

Every once in a while, I make something that's annoying to weigh when it's done. (Yeah, I could if I really, really wanted to. 😉) Let's say it's a pan of lasagna. I just cut it in 16 sections, call it 16 servings, and don't worry too much about how much weight/volume is in each serving. I figure the overs/unders will average out, over a long timespan of logging. It's been working OK for 5+ years now, so I think that's a solid theory.

Hope this makes sense!

KateMainer

Thanks for the feedback. I guess I didn’t word my question very well.

I made my dressing with all my measured ingredients and calculated the calories and nutrients for the entire batch and measured the batch so I know how many calories are in 1 tablespoon. My issue is that when I enter it as a recipe, I want it to show the referenced measurement of tablespoons, just like when we search for foods to enter in the diary. It doesn’t let you do this. I have to name the recipe “One Tablespoon of Dressing”.

AnnPT77

KateMainer wrote: »

Thanks for the feedback. I guess I didn’t word my question very well.

I made my dressing with all my measured ingredients and calculated the calories and nutrients for the entire batch and measured the batch so I know how many calories are in 1 tablespoon. My issue is that when I enter it as a recipe, I want it to show the referenced measurement of tablespoons, just like when we search for foods to enter in the diary. It doesn’t let you do this. I have to name the recipe “One Tablespoon of Dressing”.

That's true. I admit, that's a side effect . . . but I'm betting that if MFP let people put in both serving size and number of servings, people would either make them mismatch (and not understand what was wrong calorically) or would expect MFP to tell them they don't match (which is pretty much impossible). 🤷‍♀️

Since usually only do 1-gram servings or some kind of big servings, it's easy for me to glance at a recipe when I log it and know what it was. If I did more complicated things (like the dressing you mention), I'd probably adopt some standard abbreviations to put at the end of the name to reflect what I did like "Pear Thyme Vinaigrette Dressing 1T" or something.

Apologies for misunderstanding!

goal06082021

KateMainer wrote: »

Thanks for the feedback. I guess I didn’t word my question very well.

I made my dressing with all my measured ingredients and calculated the calories and nutrients for the entire batch and measured the batch so I know how many calories are in 1 tablespoon. My issue is that when I enter it as a recipe, I want it to show the referenced measurement of tablespoons, just like when we search for foods to enter in the diary. It doesn’t let you do this. I have to name the recipe “One Tablespoon of Dressing”.

Well, how many tablespoons of dressing did you make? That's the number of servings in your recipe. I guess I'm just not seeing what the problem is - the serving size and unit are up to you, you just have to tell MFP how many servings the listed quantities of ingredients yields. If you would rather enter your recipe as making 16 tablespoons of dressing versus 250 grams, that was always allowed. Is it just that there's no unit for serving size that's throwing you off?

KateMainer

Good point!!