How do you accurately log recipes?

Uselessly_Irrelevant

I *finally* invested in a food scale, and I want to try to be as accurate as I possibly can. Here is this soup I'm making today, it's in my crockpot now.



I put everything in raw, but the chicken entry is a little befuddling to me. Is this stating that those are the calories if I ate pure raw chicken, or is that how many calories my chicken will be after it cooks? If this is the case, should I alter my other entries to cooked versions instead of raw?

Secondly, how do I portion out my food correctly? What I have been doing is making a big-ole crockpot full of stuff and once it's finished cooking I portion out everything into 1 cup (measured) containers to find out how many servings it is, then readjust my recipe to fit that. Is there a better way to do this?

The only other way I can think to make it more accurate is much more cumbersome, and I'm not even sure if it would increase accuracy. I am guessing that I can weight all of my items individually raw, find the total and figure out what percentage of weight each item is to my meal. Then re-weight my entire meal cooked and re-retally calories of individual items based off of percentage it compromises, giving me a cooked-version of my meal. I feel like the major flaw would be accounting for water loss in the weight.. maybe some items lose more water than others skewing the resulting percentages?

So how do you guys do it?

Ready2Rock206

I put everything in raw, but the chicken entry is a little befuddling to me. Is this stating that those are the calories if I ate pure raw chicken, or is that how many calories my chicken will be after it cooks? If this is the case, should I alter my other entries to cooked versions instead of raw?

Cooking it doesn't change the calories. How you have it is correct.

As far as finding the servings this is what I find to be the biggest pain. I like the way you do it. Another way is to weigh it all and then divide it out or just divide it into 6 equal containers, or eyeball it and dish out what looks to be 1/6 of the soup.

Francl27

1) weigh the raw piece of chicken and enter that in grams (which I guess is too late now, but for next time)
2) I weigh the whole thing cooked when possible, and enter the amount of grams as number of servings, if not yeah I use a cup to see how many cups it is total and put that as the number of servings... it's a pain though and why I don't make soup very often :laugh: And yes it won't be totally accurate depending on how much chicken or veggies you get in each cup, but there's so much you can do.

Uselessly_Irrelevant

Cooking it doesn't change the calories. How you have it is correct.

As far as finding the servings this is what I find to be the biggest pain. I like the way you do it. Another way is to weigh it all and then divide it out or just divide it into 6 equal containers, or eyeball it and dish out what looks to be 1/6 of the soup.

You bring up a point that the nerd in me finds fascinating - from the admittedly little I've read it appears cooking does change the calories of food - not in a defying-the-laws-of-thermodynamics kind of way, but cooked food allows our body to access more of the energies stores in food. Here are a couple of articles I found interesting, which of course should be taken with a grain of salt:
· http://life.nationalpost.com/2013/03/19/when-a-calorie-isnt-a-calorie-parsing-the-raw-vs-cooked-food-debate-and-the-curious-case-of-almonds/
· http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calorie-counts-are-wrong-cooked-food-provides-a-lot-more-energy/

Not to quibble though, my original purpose for pointing out that one was perhaps "cooked" entry and the others were "raw" is because I really value consistently, I'm not particularly worried about

Thank you for the suggestion, dividing it into equal containers might work well for me, especially if I know the net total of the calories - since I'm going to eat it all in a week anyway I suppose it doesn't matter! :laugh:

tuckyfatbutt

My big question is HOW DO I KNOW what's in someone ELSE's recipe? I see other's have submitted.. BUT how do I see the recipe ingredients etc? Any thoughts? I just entered one called JET's Bison/Beef/Turkey Meatloaf in my recipes. How would another person be able to view this for their dietary needs? Looking forward to the responses

hesn92

Measure weigh everything i put in it. I usually weigh the whole thing at the end and however many oz that it weighs is how many servings I put that it is. Easier to log that way.

cwolfman13

Uselessly_Irrelevant wrote: »

Cooking it doesn't change the calories. How you have it is correct.

As far as finding the servings this is what I find to be the biggest pain. I like the way you do it. Another way is to weigh it all and then divide it out or just divide it into 6 equal containers, or eyeball it and dish out what looks to be 1/6 of the soup.

You bring up a point that the nerd in me finds fascinating - from the admittedly little I've read it appears cooking does change the calories of food - not in a defying-the-laws-of-thermodynamics kind of way, but cooked food allows our body to access more of the energies stores in food. Here are a couple of articles I found interesting, which of course should be taken with a grain of salt:
· http://life.nationalpost.com/2013/03/19/when-a-calorie-isnt-a-calorie-parsing-the-raw-vs-cooked-food-debate-and-the-curious-case-of-almonds/
· http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calorie-counts-are-wrong-cooked-food-provides-a-lot-more-energy/

Not to quibble though, my original purpose for pointing out that one was perhaps "cooked" entry and the others were "raw" is because I really value consistently, I'm not particularly worried about

Thank you for the suggestion, dividing it into equal containers might work well for me, especially if I know the net total of the calories - since I'm going to eat it all in a week anyway I suppose it doesn't matter! :laugh:

Negligible difference and not worth worrying about IMO. You also have to remember that none of this is exact anyway...calorie counting is far from an exact science.

The way you have it is just fine...it's the way I've done 100s of recipes in the recipe builder and I easily lost 40 Lbs just being as accurate as possible without going overboard.