How do I use a food scale?

I just weigh everything individually.

wanderinglight wrote: »

I know this is a silly question, but I'm curious how people use it while cooking or just making a sandwich or whatever.

Do you have a bowl on the food scale (zeroed out) and you just add all the ingredients to that bowl first before throwing them in a pan or in the oven, or do you do one ingredient at a time and then enter it into MFP as you go? How do you keep track of it all -- do you just keep your laptop on your kitchen counter? I just went to cook an omelette and I realized how much more time it takes to weigh my food! I'm committed to doing it, but I'm just wondering what the easiest way is.

So let's say I want to make an omelette with eggs, milk with the eggs, cheese, butter for the pan, mushrooms and bacon...what's the best way?

I pre-log my food so I know how much food I can eat. I do have my device with the app with me so I just check how much I had planned to use. I weigh out the predetermined portion of cheese or ham for my sandwich.
When I am cooking, I usually weigh ingredients individually because they are rarely added to the pan/dish at the exact same time. I'm following a recipe or what I have pre-logged.

If your scales do negatives (I think most do, these days), I find the easiest thing with items like butter is to put the container on the scales, tare it, and then measure how much you're taking out.

A lot of times I prelog to get a rough idea of the caloric values. When I then cook I'll weigh each raw ingredient individually and adjust the prelogged values afterwards. I keep a paper and pencil on my countertop as I find it easier to quickly note what I've weighed.
You can save recipes and even meals. For saved recipes it is usually pretty much the same ingredients but I'll adjust the weights accordingly; same for saved meals

I have the phone in the kitchen and will create recipes on the fly, scan barcodes, etc. I'm not always using a brand new recipe, though, so when I'm just making the same recipe again, all I have to do is edit an existing recipe to update the weights of the ingredients

So let's say I want to make an omelette with eggs, milk with the eggs, cheese, butter for the pan, mushrooms and bacon...what's the best way?

The best way will achieve the balance of being fairly accurate and having you do it consistently when needed, while not driving you nuts. That said:

Butter for the pan: butter is a solid, it'll go on the scale with whatever container it's stored in the fridge. Place on the scale, zero the scale. Slice off the quantity I need, this'll read on the scale as a negative number. Toss the butter in the pan

Cheese (I'm guessing shredded) will get weighed the same way

Milk is a freely pouring liquid. I measure this using cups or tablespoons, depending on the quantity used in the recipe

Eggs, like a previous poster said, I usually go by the size, like medium is 60 calories an egg. If it's egg whites from a carton, I'll weigh that either by zeroing out the carton first, but most likely by pouring the weight I need into another zeroed container/bowl/cup sitting on the scale

I'll also weigh mushrooms by zeroing out the container it comes in and just grabbing the handful I need

Bacon I've actually never weighed and just go by the calorie count listed for each slice on the package. I do set the fried strips on a paper towel to absorb excess grease

And I know I mentioned the recipe tool earlier, but I also did a lot of individual logs of the items, where the meal would list all the foods individually. A meal such as this is also easy to copy to a different day and edit the ingredients if need be

Finally, I tend to stick with the same serving sizes for meals, so those are easy to remember. Other than that, I'm fairly good with numbers and will remember weights of a few ingredients for the few minutes/hours it would take me to get them logged. A lot of users have mentioned jotting down the weights as they go on either scrap paper or a note book, for transfer to their computer based food log at a future or more convenient time