Pasta - Dried Weight or Cooked???

sararoy1981 · July 2013

Hi Everyone,

Can anyone please help? I'm having a pasta dish tonight but am confused by some of the entries in the food database, do I weigh before or after cooking? I'm a bit of a pasta fan and need to be careful I don't overeat but have no concept of weights of things so is it best to weigh before or after OR can anyone suggest a healthy portion size for someone trying to lose weight?

Thanks in advance.

Sara x

AJ_G · July 2013

Always weigh things raw or uncooked unless it specifically says to take the cooked weight. For pastas, and meats, you always weigh it raw.

A healthy portion size is whatever fits into your calorie and macronutrient intake for the day. Foods and meals are healthy not because of what they are, but because of their context in your daily intake.

Cindyinpg · July 2013

I dont know about all the database entries, some can be kinda dodgy, but the calories on the side of the box refer to the uncooked weight of pasta. It will weigh about 2.4 times more when cooked. I had to google this myself a few years ago.

ken_hogan · July 2013

On the pastas I have eaten, the package always indicates dry weight...

melindasuefritz · July 2013

cooked

flitabout · July 2013

it's 2oz dry weight. rule of thumb with pasta is about the size of a light bulb is a serving.

melindasuefritz · July 2013

mine goes under 1 cup spaghetti cooked
that's how I log it here on mfp

nvolkert90 · July 2013

Ok I love pasta so I measure out a cup of pasta and 1/2 c of sauce. It lets me enjoy my pasta without feeling like I am over eating.

professorhuggins · July 2013

if you don't have a food scale, you can always do what i do--decide on how many servings the box should be, drop the whole box of pasta and then serve it equally into however many containers you need. for example, the barilla whole wheat pasta i usually eat comes in a box of 13.25oz; i cook the whole box and divide equally onto four plates and log it as 3.3oz when i put it in my diary.

lynn1982 · July 2013

mine goes under 1 cup spaghetti cooked
that's how I log it here on mfp

That's nice, but it's also incorrect.

Pasta should be logged based on its uncooked (dry) weight. And FYI: do not rely on the MFP database. It is often wrong and potentially misleading.

tartsul · July 2013

i use my food scale to measure the pasta dry, and go by the nutrients printed on the box. i cook my pasta separately from my husbands. that way, there's no trying to figure out how much water weight my pasta gained from the cooking, or trying to figure out which noodles are mine and which are his.

mamosh81 · July 2013

i also have the problem with serving sizes so i found me this neat page today to give me a rough idea how big a serving size is

http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.nsw.gov.au/cook-it/serving-size-calculator.aspx#

as for weighing pasta and most other stuff always raw, uncooked

jasonheyd · July 2013

2 oz of uncooked pasta (the normal serving size from the box) is usually about 1 cp of cooked pasta.

newikner · July 2013

Pasta is a bit of a pain, because it gets heavier the longer you cook it (as it absorbs water), but it doesn't have any more calories. As a rule of thumb all carbs have 4 calories per gram dry weight. Because even dry pasta isn't completely dry, it is typically less. The stuff I'm looking at now is 190 calories / 56 g dry weight or 3.393 cal/g.

Suppose I'm cooking spaghetti for my family. So that we have enough, I cook 8 oz or 226.8 g. Thats 226.8 x 3.393 cal/g = 770 calories. Next I cook it, drain it, then weigh it again. After cooking it it weighs (say) 567 g. So now it has 770 calories ÷ 567 g = 1.358 cal/g. Now suppose I want 200 calories. 200 calories ÷ 1.358 cal/g = 147 g. So I weigh that out for myself into my pasta bowl.

Actually it's too hard to weigh that out accurately, so knowing what I want (147 g) I weigh out that amount approximately, then calculate how many calories it actually is. So, for example I put some in my bowl and it weighs 155g. I don't try to pull out a piece of spaghetti to make it 147, I just calculate 155g x 1.358 cal/g = 210 calories. I then enter that into myfitnesspal.

Note that myfitnesspal is pretty user-unfriendly to those of us who weigh our food. Only some foods in the database come with weight equivalents. (How many grams is a "medium" tomato, or a "serving" or a "cup" of chopped nuts?) So what I end up having to do is this: I find some entry in myfitnesspal that approximates what I am actually having. In this case we find "Fit & Active (Aldis - Whole Wheat Thin Spaghetti Noodles, Cooked". In this case the serving size appears to be 2 oz dry. I add that to my dinner (note that in the dialog that appears in the web site you can't even see how many calories you're about to add until you add it. This is an example of what I like to call "PPP" which stands for piss-poor programming) and find that I just added 200 calories. But I know that I actually had 210 calories. So I calculate 238 calories ÷ 200 calories / serving = 1.188 servings. I go back and edit the entry, this time typing 1.052 as the number of servings. Voila! Myfitnesspal has entered 210 calories for me.

The same sort of calculations need to be done for anything that absorbs water during cooking: rice, dried beans, hominy, oatmeal, etc. whenever you don't eat as much as you cooked. The problem goes away if you do eat all that you cook; then you just weigh it dry and enter that (there's still the last calculation to do if myfitnesspal doesn't have the weight calorie-equivalents, as it so often doesn't). It would be nice if myfitnesspal 1) had weight calorie equivalents in both ounces and grams for every food and, 2) had a feature to help with the water-adsorption calculation, above.

flitabout · July 2013

Pasta is a bit of a pain, because it gets heavier the longer you cook it (as it absorbs water), but it doesn't have any more calories. As a rule of thumb all carbs have 4 calories per gram dry weight. Because even dry pasta isn't completely dry, it is typically less. The stuff I'm looking at now is 190 calories / 56 g dry weight or 3.393 cal/g.

Suppose I'm cooking spaghetti for my family. So that we have enough, I cook 8 oz or 226.8 g. Thats 226.8 x 3.393 cal/g = 770 calories. Next I cook it, drain it, then weigh it again. After cooking it it weighs (say) 567 g. So now it has 770 calories ÷ 567 g = 1.358 cal/g. Now suppose I want 200 calories. 200 calories ÷ 1.358 cal/g = 147 g. So I weigh that out for myself into my pasta bowl.

Actually it's too hard to weigh that out accurately, so knowing what I want (147 g) I weigh out that amount approximately, then calculate how many calories it actually is. So, for example I put some in my bowl and it weighs 155g. I don't try to pull out a piece of spaghetti to make it 147, I just calculate 155g x 1.358 cal/g = 210 calories. I then enter that into myfitnesspal.

Note that myfitnesspal is pretty user-unfriendly to those of us who weigh our food. Only some foods in the database come with weight equivalents. (How many grams is a "medium" tomato, or a "serving" or a "cup" of chopped nuts?) So what I end up having to do is this: I find some entry in myfitnesspal that approximates what I am actually having. In this case we find "Fit & Active (Aldis - Whole Wheat Thin Spaghetti Noodles, Cooked". In this case the serving size appears to be 2 oz dry. I add that to my dinner (note that in the dialog that appears in the web site you can't even see how many calories you're about to add until you add it. This is an example of what I like to call "PPP" which stands for piss-poor programming) and find that I just added 200 calories. But I know that I actually had 210 calories. So I calculate 238 calories ÷ 200 calories / serving = 1.188 servings. I go back and edit the entry, this time typing 1.052 as the number of servings. Voila! Myfitnesspal has entered 210 calories for me.

The same sort of calculations need to be done for anything that absorbs water during cooking: rice, dried beans, hominy, oatmeal, etc. whenever you don't eat as much as you cooked. The problem goes away if you do eat all that you cook; then you just weigh it dry and enter that (there's still the last calculation to do if myfitnesspal doesn't have the weight calorie-equivalents, as it so often doesn't). It would be nice if myfitnesspal 1) had weight calorie equivalents in both ounces and grams for every food and, 2) had a feature to help with the water-adsorption calculation, above.

Wow that just made my brain hurt.....