How do I weigh for one serving on this recipe?

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doxie_life
doxie_life Posts: 5 Member
in Food and Nutrition
I made creamy chicken with artichoke and spinach last night. It says it has six servings. I weigh all food I eat. So my question is how much does one serving weigh? (I only used 3 chicken breast instead of 6. If that makes a difference)
Here is the recipe:
Ingredients
2 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
6 chicken breasts
kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1/2 tsp. dried oregano
3 tbsp. butter
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 c. baby spinach
1 (13.75-oz.) can artichoke hearts, chopped
1/2 c. sliced roasted red peppers
1 c. half-and-half
3/4 c. shredded mozzarella
1/4 c. Parmesan

Replies

  • rj0150684
    rj0150684 Posts: 227 Member
    edited May 2018
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    If the final dish is 6 servings, each serving will weigh 1:6th of the total. There’s no reasonable way to estimate that from an ingredients list.

    Also, if you don’t know how much of each ingredient you put in, you won’t know how many calories each serving is. Weighing at the end is nice for portion control, but weighing in the beginning (each ingredient) would tell you how many calories you have in there.
  • h1udd
    h1udd Posts: 623 Member
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    work out the calories for all the ingredients .. add them all together to get a total for the entire recipie, then divide it by the amount of portions you are going to split it into ..... the number will be the amount per portion
  • ServusChristi
    ServusChristi Posts: 98 Member
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    I always enter my recipies in MFP with a serving size of one (1), then figure out what fraction of that serving I'm eating -- whether by weighing, cutting, or scooping, it's just a matter of figuring out the total vs. the portion I'm eating. In this case, I'd weigh the whole thing after cooking, weigh my portion, and then I have my fraction. (BTW I weigh the meat raw for entering the recipe.)
  • Lounmoun
    Lounmoun Posts: 8,426 Member
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    Weigh the whole recipe. Divide that total weight by 6 if you want it to have 6 servings.
    Are you using the recipe builder to log it?
  • doxie_life
    doxie_life Posts: 5 Member
    edited May 2018
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    Ok so I weigh each ingredient and get the total calories. I weigh the whole recipe get the total weight. Divide that (the total weight) by how many servings I want. Then divide the total calories by the servings. If I am wrong will somebody correct me?

    Yes I use MyFitnessPal recipe builder, but for this particular recipe I modified it a little.
  • seska422
    seska422 Posts: 3,217 Member
    edited May 2018
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    doxie_life wrote: »
    Ok so I weigh each ingredient and get the total calories. I weigh the whole recipe get the total weight. Divide that (the total weight) by how many servings I want. Then divide the total calories by the servings. If I am wrong will somebody correct me?

    Yes I use MyFitnessPal recipe builder, but for this particular recipe I modified it a little.
    You need the final cooked recipe weight too since the water content will likely change while cooking.

    Weigh every ingredient as it goes in to get the nutrition info for each one and enter those values into the recipe builder. Also weigh the cooking container so that you know what it weighs. Then, after cooking, weigh the container/cooked food combo and subtract out the container weight. That will give you the total weight for the recipe.

    If you do it this way, you can put the cooked weight in as the number of servings. For example, the cooked recipe weighs 454 grams so you say that it's 454 servings. You can then weigh out the exact amount that you want, be that 54 grams or 68 grams or whatever, and enter that weight as how many servings you are eating.
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 10,022 Member
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    doxie_life wrote: »
    Ok so I weigh each ingredient and get the total calories. I weigh the whole recipe get the total weight. Divide that (the total weight) by how many servings I want. Then divide the total calories by the servings. If I am wrong will somebody correct me?

    Yes I use MyFitnessPal recipe builder, but for this particular recipe I modified it a little.

    I don't understand why you need to divide the total calories by the servings if you used the MFP recipe builder. Just enter 6 in the recipe builder where it asks for the number of servings (and if you like, add the weight of a serving in the name of the recipe, e.g., "Creamy Chicken with artichokes and spinach, srvg = XXX g" where XXX is total weight of recipe divided by 6). Once you tell the recipe builder it makes 6 servings, it will divide the calories (and all the other nutrients) for the total recipe by 6 to get the calories (and other nutrients) per serving.

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