Weigh before or after?

Oinst440

Lots of foods weigh significantly less after cooking. When I lookup calories in the tracker are they listed as cooked or before cooking? Thanks

penguinmama87

Depending on the item, it should specify in the listing. If I want a specifically cooked item (like for sauteed or roasted vegetables), I will specify "cooked" in my search - it's too much trouble, IMO, to make and save a weighted recipe with two ingredients. So I just add the oil as a separate line item.

wilson10102018

Just be sure that if you use a raw weight you are eating everything you take off the scale, like bones, skin, rendered fat, stems, etc. Otherwise search for "Cooked" and weight if after you cook it. This is essential for things like bacon, potatoes, etc.

MsCzar

Whenever I can, I try to find and use the uncooked weight by specifying 'uncooked' or 'raw' in the search box. This is especially useful with foods like rice, pasta, popcorn, and ground beef. My only exception is bone-in chicken, in which case I weigh the cooked chicken portion - and then subtract what's left after the meal, logging it as either white or dark meat.

goal06082021

I make heavy use of the recipe builder. I use raw ingredient weights when building recipes, but I weigh them as/after doing the prep work - so I'm weighing a bowl full of diced onion, not a whole raw onion because I'm going to throw away part of the onion. For meat, I'll do whatever's easiest tbh. If there's a bone/skin I want to remove before cooking, I'll weigh the raw deboned and/or deskinned meat and find a boneless/skinless entry; if I want to cook the cut of meat bone-in/skin-on, I'll weigh the whole thing and use a bone-in/skin-on entry and err on the side of overestimating calories, usually. I'll use cooked weight for determining serving size, though - something with a variable serving size, like carnitas or spaghetti sauce or soup, I'll log the recipe as "per g" and set the number of servings to the weight of the finished dish in grams (so 1 gram of the finished dish = 1 serving).

dewit

I have issues with pasta and quinoa, say.

So sometimes
* I weigh them raw
* use the label to do my own calculation for the calories in the whole cooked thing
* then I estimate how much I ate from what I cooked and finally
* I use the database entry that fits best.

Other times I just use the database and pick the best fit for the cooked thing that I just weighted. I prefer grams/oz to cups...

goal06082021

@dewit I always weigh pasta/quinoa/rice/etc dry and log it with an entry for uncooked xyz per g or per 100g, it's much easier to get an accurate weight on dry goods.

yirara

I always log everything raw as I don't know what the definition is of 'cooked', how much water was expelled or taken up. Dry is just more precise.

callsitlikeiseeit

with very few exceptions, I weigh everything raw