Figuring out the yield of recipes

rljohnsufl

I know that cooking at home is the best way to lose weight and eat healthier. That said, I find it hard to cook large batches of food and log it.

Say I make a pot of soup tonight. I calculate that there should be 8 servings (or the recipe says eight servings). So a serving would be yield divided by 8. How do you figure out the total yield of the recipe? When I need to get dinner on the table, I don't want to spend 10 minutes pouring my soup into measuring cups or trying to figure out the tare weight of the pot.

I could pour the soup into a large tupperware container, but I really don't want to pour hot soup into plastic. Sometimes I attempt to weigh the food, but that comes out a little different every time and I don't want to keep on updating the recipe. Plus I have to subtract the tare weight of the container I'm using, and most of my pans are too big to use on the kitchen scale.

I'll keep on doing these things (PITA though they are) if there are no better ways, but I was wondering if anyone else had a good way to do this? Or am I being too anal? ;-)

Angeloftheshore

I do this by adding my recipes to the data base, ingredient by ingredient. Then I figure out how much of it I would consider a serving and put that in for servings. At times I have done this just to see what the calorie count would be on a recipe I find online that did not have the calories and nutrition info given. A few times the calories have been high, so I either have not made it, or I have figured out of to lower the calorie count by substitutions or lowering the serving size and having a large salad with it (I do that for pasta dishes).

majope

I do measure, but it doesn't take me anywhere near 10 minutes. This is how I do it: I figure a cup and a half is a good-sized serving for most soups (in general, that is: very low cal ones maybe two cups, for very hearty ones a cup might be enough). And I have to serve it up with something, so why not a measuring cup instead of a ladle? Then, once my family's bowls have been filled, I scoop out the remaining soup into a Pyrex container, still using the measuring cups so I can see how many servings are left. The container is what I'll refrigerate the leftovers in, so again it needs to go in there anyway.

It can't possibly take more than a minute more than scooping up soup with a ladle and then pouring the remainder into the storage container. And that is more than worth it to get an accurate count of servings.

BaconMD

I weigh how much I put into my wife's bowl, then how much I put into mine. Then we eat. Then I weigh the rest that goes into the fridge. And then I add it all together. If it's 2.8kg of food, say, I put 28 servings in my recipe and in the recipe title, I put "Recipe Name (100g)" so that way I can log easily - if I took 350g for myself, I log 3.5 servings.

rljohnsufl

Thanks for all of the tips. I guess it doesn't really take 10 minutes to measure recipes, but it feels that way when I just want to sit down and eat. I'll be trying your suggestions.