Mixed food weighing techniques?

PapaChanoli

I'm wondering how some of you who weigh their food approach it? I just start weighing and thris morning I made eggs with diced leftover pork chops, as an example. Being only two foods mixed I thought it would be worth it to try something other than estimate. I just estimated high for the butter I used to cook them in.

So, any techniques out there for handling it?

CindyMarcuzAdams

For something like butter you could use a measuring spoon. If you want a way to measure the grams you would put your butter container on your scale , tare it to 0 then remove the amount of butter you want to use. You then see a negative amount on your scale. That would be your grams of butter. Works for anything in a jar.
Hope this helped.

paulawatkins1974

I think the only way to get an accurate weight of mixed foods is to weigh them seperately before combining them. For me, sometimes that's too much of a pain in the *kitten* so I admittedly estimate. Prob why I've only lost 34 pounds in 5 months. Oh well.

PapaChanoli

For something like butter you could use a measuring spoon. If you want a way to measure the grams you would put your butter container on your scale , tare it to 0 then remove the amount of butter you want to use. You then see a negative amount on your scale. That would be your grams of butter. Works for anything in a jar.
Hope this helped.

It did make sense, but I'm most interested in, for instance, the pork chops that are mixed with the eggs. It's not the best example because their calories are fairly similar.

Maybe I didn't ask it well.

So, how would you measure a ham and cheese omelet where the different foods are all integrated and you're sharing it wih other people.

I'm thinking there may be a good math formula which would work for when you know the original weights and then weigh your portion. My math skills don't immediately call a formula to mind though.

I still don't feel like I'm asking this very well, but maybe that will help.

yarwell

most digital scales allow you to "tare" (zero) after weighing each ingredient, if you're too math challenged to do subtractions.

Not sure I really understood the question though.

PapaChanoli

Deleted duplicate

PapaChanoli

Ok, I'll elaborate lest someone assume I failed second grade.

Today I made pork chops and eggs for 5 people. I weighed the individual ingredients going in, (using the awesome tare feature.) I took notes on those weights and the total. I didn't find any of that to be much of a hassle, but just a couple of quick and easy extra steps.

I then served myself a portion of the mixed final product. As it turns out I ate about 25% of the total so I put in 25% of the weight of each item and consider it a fair estimate. Other foods however are more complicated because they have quite a few more ingredients or your portion is not an even percentage.

So, I'm curious how others handle similar situations.

126siany

You can also use the recipe builder.

CAC10456

The way you did it would work. I usually create a recipe with all the ingredients and then divide it into the appropriate number of servings. This also allows me to vary the amount I eat. For example, you could have entered your recipe as 5 servings, but since you ate 25% of it, you would log it as 1.25 servings.

CindyMarcuzAdams

I understand now I think. Have you ever used the recipe feature of mfp. Adding in all your ingredients then the number of servings. No matter what you do something like a soup or stew will never be accurate.

larrodarro

It sounds like you did just right with the eggs and pork chops. Cooking for more than one person does make it harder to get an exact measure. When it's just my wife and I, it isn't too hard to figure out. But the more people, the more trouble it is. I use the recipe feature whenever I have anything with several ingredients. It is a pain to have to spoon up a whole pot of soup to find out how many servings there are, but it worth it to know. I guess if you had two pots exactly the same, you could use one to zero your scale, then weigh the soup, weigh one ladle of it, and do the math.

But anytime I'm not sure about calories, I add 10%, just to be on the safe side. Or walk another mile.

Larro

Edit: I see about three people mentioned the recipe builder and soup while I was posting. Great minds think alike.

yarwell

I would add it all up and divide by the portion that I ate, which would be an estimate. If you made a pizza and served it to six people then 1/6th the total would be near enough for me.

PapaChanoli

Hmm, it looks like the recipe builder may be the answer I was looking for. I wasn't aware of how it worked.

Thank you for all the help. My search queries were not yielding good results.

Truth be told, I've estimated for a month and done well, but I'm a little OCD when it comes to learning new and efficient ways to do something new. It makes sense that the estimates are going to be far more accurate when you know what went in. I usually add about ten percent too, when I'm unsure.

Thank you again!

paperpudding

Recipe builder is really handy.

You could use it for a 'recipe' of just 2 combined ingredients.

I put all the original ingredients in when making the food, then weigh the total product ( I weigh the empty pan/crockpot first then weigh it full of recipe and then deduct the difference to get recipe weight) then divide by 100 and call it, "pumpkin soup (or chops and eggs) 100 g servings" - then just work out amount I am having from that - ie I weigh my portion, if it is 450g, I call it 4.5 serves.

icrushit

I wouldn't overthink it, what you did was fine, unless you want to be really anal about weighing.

Jim1960

I also use the recipe builder. Lately I've been using my account on allrecipes.com and then importing it into myfitnesspal. I do that for recipes I want to repeat. I usually take a picture of a plated version of it - if I have the time. That's the only way I've found to get a picture into myfitnesspal recipes. I'm a bit OCD too.....

chargraves

Recipe builder is really handy.

You could use it for a 'recipe' of just 2 combined ingredients.

I put all the original ingredients in when making the food, then weigh the total product ( I weigh the empty pan/crockpot first then weigh it full of recipe and then deduct the difference to get recipe weight) then divide by 100 and call it, "pumpkin soup (or chops and eggs) 100 g servings" - then just work out amount I am having from that - ie I weigh my portion, if it is 450g, I call it 4.5 serves.

This is the best idea ever! I have been portioning out the entire pot or pan after cooking then going back to Recipe Builder and adjusting the servings. It sort of locked me into the serving and made it difficult to vary portions!

ZBuffBod

I have a scale that goes back to zero so I weigh the first item, set the scale to zero, weigh the next, set the scale to zero, etc. I try to ensure each item is a set number of serving to make it easy to do the division. For example, five servings of eggs, five servings of bacon for one dish. I then divide by the number of servings so if serving 5 people, I average each person getting one serving of each item.

Phew! Hope that makes sense.

paperpudding

Recipe builder is really handy.

You could use it for a 'recipe' of just 2 combined ingredients.

I put all the original ingredients in when making the food, then weigh the total product ( I weigh the empty pan/crockpot first then weigh it full of recipe and then deduct the difference to get recipe weight) then divide by 100 and call it, "pumpkin soup (or chops and eggs) 100 g servings" - then just work out amount I am having from that - ie I weigh my portion, if it is 450g, I call it 4.5 serves.

This is the best idea ever! I have been portioning out the entire pot or pan after cooking then going back to Recipe Builder and adjusting the servings. It sort of locked me into the serving and made it difficult to vary portions!

Thank you.
Cant claim it as my original idea, read it on another thread here a while ago.

Further to this, I don't weigh the empty crockpot now - as I use it often to make soups etc, I weighed it once, then wrote the weight on bottom of pot in permanent texta for future reference.

ajff

100 g serving strategy: This is gold! Thanks for sharing!

PapaChanoli

Wow, this thread really paid off. That divide by 100 and create 100gram servings is exactly the kind of thing I was hopng to learn. A lot of the other ideas are fairly common sense, but until you know it, it can seem pretty uncommon.

Thanks a lot. Between the recipe function and the trick for creating 100gram servings, that's an an easily practicable method that will get you right in the ball park without an insane amount of hassle.

PapaChanoli

I just tried a fake recipe to see how it works. When dividing the recipe by 100 for the amount of servings, if the number isn't even and you input a partial serving, the app rounds down to an even number of servings. This is helpful because the numbers are still reasonably accurate, but the slight bit of error is in favor of eating less calories. This is exactly the type of simple solution I was hoping to find.

Thanks again.