Recipe per gram instead of portion

SiteConcept

When you want to make a dish, you are asked how many portions the recipe refers to, but if you work with the ingredients you have at home, it can be difficult to know exactly how many "portions" a dish will be.
My suggestion is to add up all the ingredients to find out the total nutritional value per gram so you can indicate how much of a specific mix you took, instead of being locked to "portions".

Simplified Example: (Fat/Protein/Carbohydrates)
400gr Minced meat (15%F /24%P /0%K)
100gr Kidney beans (0.7%F /7.8%P /12%K)
100gr Jasmine rice (1%F / 8%P / 78%K)

Total:
600gr Mix (61.7gr F / 96gr P / 90gr K)

If we divide this by the total weight, we get the nutritional value of the mixture per gram.

600gr÷600= 1gr
61.7gr F ÷ 600= 0.102gr F (10.2% F)
96gr P ÷ 600= 0.16gr P (16% P)
90gr K ÷ 600= 0.15gr K (15% K)

If we are given the option to choose a similar meal in grams instead of in portions, I think it will be easier to create meals and get a more accurate value of what is in the lunch box, when the contents are weighed instead of entering "1 portion of the recipe ".

Lietchi

You need the total cooked weight though, not the total weight of the raw ingredients, to make that work. And that's not something MFP can know without you telling them.

You can use the total cooked weight as the number of portions in the recipe, that's what some people here do.

AnnPT77

Yes, like Lietchi said, I just weigh the finished food in grams, and use the number of grams as the number of servings. MFP will give you some kind of message that amounts to "that's a lot of servings, do you mean it?", but it will let you go on and use that number if you proceed.

She's right about the raw/cooked weight issue, too: MFP can't know the cooked weight unless you tell it. Tell it that in the number of servings, and you're all set, I think.

isabelpereira9662

I second this idea. Regarding the arguments above about cooked vs. raw weight, the person inputting the ingredients should give the cooked weight (maybe the app can put a warning/advice/reminder for that). I find it very unpractical to define portions, even if it means setting the cooked weight in grams as the number of portions. Certainly a way to go about that (and what I have been doing so far), but not ideal at all.

Lietchi

isabelpereira9662 wrote: »

I second this idea. Regarding the arguments above about cooked vs. raw weight, the person inputting the ingredients should give the cooked weight (maybe the app can put a warning/advice/reminder for that). I find it very unpractical to define portions, even if it means setting the cooked weight in grams as the number of portions. Certainly a way to go about that (and what I have been doing so far), but not ideal at all.

I'm not sure I understand precisely what you means:
- do you mean the recipe creator should enter the cooked weight of each ingredient in the recipe (which hardly seems practical)
- or the total cooked/prepared weight as a separate piece of information on top of the estimated number of portions (which does seem like it could be useful)