new to food scale

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sturgeonml2017
sturgeonml2017 Posts: 46 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
So my mom got me a food scale for Christmas..yay! I guess she realizes I am serious about this so that's a small victory in itself. Anyways my question is about tips for making weighing and measuring meals . I've been eating a lot of frozen and prepared items to feel like I'm accurately controling calories but now that I have the scale id like to start cooking more again. So tips for weighing and portioning things like casseroles and multiple ingredient items.example/spaghetti has tomato, tomato sauce , pasta and ground turkey all mixed together. How do you accurately measure that?

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  • vespiquenn
    vespiquenn Posts: 1,455 Member
    edited December 2016
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    In the case of something like spaghetti, I weigh out the pasta and sauce separately and log them. The tare function is wonderful. Add the pasta (which typically is weighed dry), log it, tare, weigh sauce, log, done.

    In regards to things like casseroles, the recipe builder on MFP is a great tool. Weigh out all the ingredients as you go, weigh the final product, then divide it into the correct portions (I use increments of 100g but you can do 1g as well).

    It takes a few times to get use to, but is a wonderful tool once you get into the habit of using it.
  • shadow2soul
    shadow2soul Posts: 7,692 Member
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    Weigh each ingredient as you add it to the dish
    Add the individual ingredients with accurate weights to the recipe builder
    Enter # of servings you want or as the final weight of cooked dish

    Pastas are weighed dry unless otherwise noted on package
    Meats are typically weighed raw
  • diannethegeek
    diannethegeek Posts: 14,776 Member
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    Get familiar with the tare button. You can put a bowl on the scale and tare it, resetting it to zero. Then add your first ingredient, note the weight, and hit tare again. Then the second ingredient, and so on.

    For some things, it's easier to put the whole container on the scale, tare it, and scoop out what you want. The negative grams will be the amount you used.

    There's a recipe builder here that's very useful for figuring the calories in a dish once you get to know it. It lets you weigh all the ingredients as you add them to the dish and then divide by the number of servings you want it to be.

    A lot of us weigh the finished dish and input that as the number of servings. Then you can just insert the number of grams you eat and use that as the number of servings.
  • sturgeonml2017
    sturgeonml2017 Posts: 46 Member
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    That makes it seem so much simpler! Thanks guys
  • kkress92
    kkress92 Posts: 118 Member
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    You can also copy recipes from the web without too much difficulty.
    Click "add food" then "recipes" then "create recipe" and it will give you the option to manually enter a recipe or copy from the web. Simply copy and paste the URL from the webpage into mfp and follow the prompts. Voila!
  • WatchJoshLift
    WatchJoshLift Posts: 520 Member
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    Welcome to the obsession. :wink:
  • wrharvill
    wrharvill Posts: 60 Member
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    Regarding pasta with jarred spaghetti sauce specifically: My jarred sauce says it's 5 servings so I measure out 5 portions of pasta to go with. Once its all cooked I put an empty bowl on the scale, tare it out, then add the mixed pasta and sauce. Divide by 5 to get my grams per serving and portion it all out. Voila! Perfectly portioned meals to freeze for later.

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