Homemade Recipes & Nutritional Info

lizamichelle1
lizamichelle1 Posts: 36 Member
in Food and Nutrition
How do you all come up with your nutritional information for your personal recipes? Prepackaged and "fast food" is easy - just go to their websites.

Is there any website other than MFP, that you use to get the nutritional information of the various items you include in your recipes?

Do you include the value of seasonings in your final computation?

Do you tally it all then divide the end result into portions and then post?

Just wondering.

Replies

  • CookNLift
    CookNLift Posts: 3,660 Member
    I usually try and weigh out/portion my meals and input them into MFP. As far as seasonings, I usually omit them unless they have sodium in them, and then I may just add the sodium in manually.

    When I make stuff at home, which is all the time, I put the amount of the foods I am putting in ahead of time, and then add in stuff like olive oil, garlic, chicken stock, as I measure it and add it (rough estimates, which stay pretty close). I think the amount of calories in stuff like curry powder, garlic powder, and black pepper are minimal enough to omit, whereas if you are using garlic salt, sea salt, adobo, etc with salt, they need to be added in just as butter or olive oil would bc they have more calories and substance to them.
  • MrsB123111
    MrsB123111 Posts: 535 Member
    There is an area on the site that you can enter in "recipes". I usually do that, as I make the majority of my food from scratch. You include how many servings and all the ingredients you used. I rarely include spices, as I don't really measure, and they are so low in caloric value anyway. I will include olive oil and stocks or broths.
  • AZKristi
    AZKristi Posts: 1,801 Member
    I use the recipe feature on MFP. Most ingredients I use are already in the database. I verify the nutritional content of meat and produce on the USDA website (http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/). Many of the entries in MFP are pretty accurate, but I definitely double check meat.
  • lois4468
    lois4468 Posts: 166 Member
    Most ingredients are listed in MFP and the "Recipe" section work great for that. I even did magic bars that had lots of ingredients in them. Anyway works great!
  • laserturkey
    laserturkey Posts: 1,680 Member
    I use the MFP recipe builder most of the time, pulling ingredient info from the database. If an ingredient isn't listed or I don't trust the data, then I put mine in the database with the information listed on the label. Since I often make big batches of things, I do put in the herbs and spices as well as I can. If I'm just making a smaller amount of something, or something with a pinch of this and a dash of that, I will sometimes leave those seasonings off since they won't make any noticeable difference.
  • Brie4me
    Brie4me Posts: 238
    I use MFP's Recipe creator and individually list each item and the amount used, then select the number of servings the entire recipe will make. Depending on the number of ingredients, it can sometimes be a process, but I think it's fun :)

    I gather all the ingredients and enter them, checking for accuracy of the nutritional values listed in the database before adding it my recipe. There are a lot of mistakes in the database, so I always confirm first.

    I try to include most seasonings (ex: a tsp of paprika has 20 calories), but honestly, I'm guessing amounts of spices since I rarely measure those. When you search for spices type in "spice" after the item to help narrow your search (ex: "garlic powder spice").


    Here a site that you might like for reference:

    http://calorielab.com/index.html
  • bottom
    bottom Posts: 52 Member
    I agree with the above posters, but sometimes if I'm in a hurry, I will look through the database and find a similar food and choose the entry with a middle-high caloric value. For example, I made broccoli salad from scratch but had to leave right away. In the database are many types of broccoli salad, but I chose the one that listed bacon as an ingredient (as did mine) and went with it. This gave me a total of 199 cal per cup, which, considering the mayo and bacon, is probably fairly close.

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