Measuring foods

hotrodmay85

I've started measuring foods a little more precisely for portion control, cals etc. But struggling to find ways to calculate homemade foods like sauces? Any tips?

herblovinmom

@hotrodmay85, You can create a recipe if your sauces are for multiple servings or you can create a meal. You add all the individual weighed ingredients and then tell it how many servings it is or how much you plan to eat and then you have your calories for the sauce you made. I much prefer the create a recipe feature but lots of MFP users prefer the create a meal feature. Play around and see what works for you. I do hope I understood your question correctly. 🤔

mtaratoot

Use a food scale!

If you're making a sauce you'll use for multiple meals, create a recipe. If it's just for one meal, enter each item on its own. For things like oils and liquids, remove the lid from the container, put it on the scale, and get a tare weight. Take out what you're going to use. Put the bottle back on the scale. The negative number is how much you used. You can do the same for things like nut butters.

If you make a bulk sauce, weigh the final product in grams. Set the number of servings in the recipe to the number of grams you made. Then when you use the sauce, weigh it the same way you would have weighed oil or other liquids.

yirara

Homemade food is a lot easier to track than anything you buy readymade because you never know how an idealized portion compares to what you got. With homemade food you're really in control.

history_grrrl

The great thing about the recipe tool also is that you can easily adjust. If I’m making a pile of roasted root vegetables but am using different veggies, I just go in and change the items and amounts and save the new info. It’s also useful for reminding me of tweaks I’ve made to recipes I use, like reducing the butter and oil or making other substitutions. I haven’t really mastered the meals tool, though; is that for items I’ve entered in the database, or for combinations of foods we put together regularly?

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AnnPT77

history_grrrl wrote: »

The great thing about the recipe tool also is that you can easily adjust. If I’m making a pile of roasted root vegetables but am using different veggies, I just go in and change the items and amounts and save the new info. It’s also useful for reminding me of tweaks I’ve made to recipes I use, like reducing the butter and oil or making other substitutions. I haven’t really mastered me daals tool, though; is that for items I’ve entered in the database, or for combinations of foods we put together regularly?

Mostly for the bolded, IMO - at least that's what it's designed for. (People use it in clever ways besides.)

The main difference (functionally, IMO) is that when you put a list of things into a meal, then log the meal, the individual line items are copied into your daily diary. You can then adjust the quantities or even delete some line items right in the diary page. The recipes function lets you input a recipe, but when you log serving(s) of the recipe, it copies into your diary as one line item (e.g., "lasagna" rather than "lasagna noodles, ground beef, tomato sauce, cheese . . . . etc.").

I use the meals function for certain sandwiches I make regularly with only slight variations, for my morning oatmeal with varied add-ins, and that sort of thing. It's just a way of getting multiple lines into my food log with one click.

COGypsy

tiaamyom wrote: »

The recipe feature in the app has really saved me from a fate of only eating prepackaged food

That’s funny. Recipe mode and food tracking are a huge part of what made me stop cooking pretty much altogether.

drana325

Oh man use the recipe builder. I use it ALL the time. Get a food scale. And weigh everything in oz and grams. And then enter it in. Seriously works well!

springlering62

Use the “meals” function instead of the recipe function.

It works the same, but permits you to add instructions, you can copy it if you want to change up the recipe without obliterating the original, plus it posts individual foods to your diary. That’s useful if you’re tracking which specific foods are contributing protein, sugar, or whatever.

Meals are far more flexible than recipes.