How to calculate home cooking calories accurately?

FeelingLessChubby

After a break of around 2 years I'm finally comfortable enough to cook again - for various reasons. Having access to a kitchen has really helped ha ha

I could use some advice on how to accurately calculate calories in home cooking. I've done some research online for similar recipes and also here on MFP and it seems the calories differ so very much that making an estimate feels like a very inaccurate way of doing things.

For example, home made fajitas, some are listed at hundreds of cals each, and some a fraction of that... and with no further details available (no descriptions) it's hard to see what's caused the difference.

Would it be accurate to calculate the calories based on literally adding everything up? For example, I made a chicken veg soup today from scratch. One of the ingredients was mushrooms sautéed in 2 tablespoons of sunflower oil. Do I get the calories of the mushrooms plus the cals in oil? But then it goes into a huge pot (I make a lot) so how do I then know how much goes in a bowl?

Same with everything else - fajitas on Thursday night, home made. Easy to calculate the toppings and tortillas, but not so easy the chicken/bacon/pepper/onion mix!

I'd love some feedback on this please

MsWallwoman

I like to add my home made dishes into MFP under the recipes tab. It calculates macros and calories as per the servings you set and it keeps it In Memory for the next time you make that dish.

Good luck on your journey. :flowerforyou:

Francl27

Yeah you can use the 'recipe' tab. Add all your ingredients, then divide by the amount of servings. It's a major pain though, the only recipe I've made was a taco soup (delicious), but I had a huge crockpot of it and really wasn't going to spend one hour weighing everything to figure out exactly how many grams a serving was, so I just eyeballed the number of servings.

So I don't really do many recipes anymore, lol.

notdieting

If you add everything seperately on the first occasion, you can then use the 'quick tools' tab to 'remember meal' so next time you have the same thing, you just go to 'meals' and add it all as a single meal. This will give you a completely honest and accurate calorie count as long as you always use the same recipe. If there are any changes, you can add it as a meal and then tweak the quantities as necessary.

salladeve

Use the recipe tab, the first time is a pain, but then after that all you have to do is choose the recipe you created and how many servings you are eating.

For example I put in a recipe for Chili, added all the ingredients using my smart phone and scanning the bar code. I estimated that it would make 6 servings of 1 cup each when I was starting. After I was all done and before we began eating I actually took a measuring cup and measured out how many cups the final pot of chili made. I adjusted the servings to 8 in my recipe because it actually came out to more then I thought. Now when I eat it if I'm really hungry I may have 1.5 or 2 servings, or for lunch just 1 serving, but the point is I know exactly how many calories I'm getting because I accurately recorded my recipe.

By the way, to answer your question about oil, yes if you use 2TBS of oil to saute onions for example you enter the onions and the oil in the recipe.

Stage14

I enter every new recipe I cook. It's a pain the first time, but then it is there every time afterwards. After I enter the recipe, my husband gets the numbers for one serving from me and enters it in under "my foods" so he also has it saved. To me, it's totally worth it, because it's the most accurate way to track the calories and once I've done the hard part once, it's right there.

millyvanilli321

Like others have said, the first time might take a little while, but if you cook the same things over again, then you have I to hand. A lot of stuff in my dairy is listed as things like "Thai green curry, home made paste, no rice" so I know exactly what it is lol