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Recipe per gram instead of portion

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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 ".
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2 votes

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Replies

  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 6,121 Member
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    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
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,170 Member
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    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.