Creating recipes - am I doing this right?

jelleigh
jelleigh Posts: 743 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
So I made a pasta dish but it seems suspiciously reasonable calorie wise.

I weighed the pasta dry and entered it into my recipe builder, weighed the vegetables and tare in between each type. Enter all vegetable weights. Measure oil. Cook veg and pasta. Weigh everything together at the end and enter the total # of grams as the number of servings for the recipe. Then I weigh out my personal portion in grams and that's how many servings I had. Like I ate 400 grams of the dish so I put in 400 servings. Did I get that right?

Replies

  • jelleigh
    jelleigh Posts: 743 Member
    I guess it could be wrong entries? Or maybe I've just stayed away from pasta for so long that I have no idea what 500 calories looks like!

    Here's the measurements:

    260 grams Catelli gluten free spaghetti (dry)
    260 grams zucchini
    227 grams white button mushrooms
    30 grams Saputo parmesan petals
    3 tbsp. olive oil

    Overall weight was 1455 grams. My serving of 436 grams (which filled a big plate!) came to 538 calories? Then I added 4 oz chicken (227 cals) for a total of 765. Which isn't low by any means but it was a really big meal!
  • gallicinvasion
    gallicinvasion Posts: 1,015 Member
    edited June 2019
    Seems right to me; I just tried it in the recipe builder. 500 calories seems reasonable for a small pasta dish without a creamy sauce. Maybe it seemed bigger because it was paired with 4 oz of chicken, and you bulked up the pasta with added zucchini?
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 9,959 Member
    jelleigh wrote: »
    I guess it could be wrong entries? Or maybe I've just stayed away from pasta for so long that I have no idea what 500 calories looks like!

    Here's the measurements:

    260 grams Catelli gluten free spaghetti (dry)
    260 grams zucchini
    227 grams white button mushrooms
    30 grams Saputo parmesan petals
    3 tbsp. olive oil

    Overall weight was 1455 grams. My serving of 436 grams (which filled a big plate!) came to 538 calories? Then I added 4 oz chicken (227 cals) for a total of 765. Which isn't low by any means but it was a really big meal!

    I'm not familiar with that brand of pasta, and I know gluten-free products are sometimes more calorie-dense than their gluten-containing counterparts. But using the calories for standard pasta, my back-of-the-envelope calculations gave me 535 kcals, FWIW. (Before the chicken)
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,540 Member
    My concern would be with the actual weighs

    You have about 555g of ingredients that don't change too much when it.comes to weight: veggies, cheese, oil.

    You're generating about 900g of finished product from 260g of dry pasta. That 3.5 to 1 or so.

    Of the top off my head pasta is normally less than 2.5 to 1.

    Did you tare the pot or containers for your finished product?
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,540 Member
    Could your initial dry pasta weight have been slightly higher?

    ANOTHER POSSIBLE SOURCE OF ERROR: I don't know how you wrote things down before transcribing; but a quick online check of Catelli glutten free spaghetti gives me calories such that your complete recipe comes very close to 1455 calories. (945 for the pasta + 360 for oil + 120 for cheese = 1425... say 50 for the zucchini, and 50 for the mushrooms... comes to 1525... very close to your 1455).

    Also, IF your quantity = 1455 and calories are 1525 then calories for 436 = 457; not 538.

    BTW: please weight the olive oil which is one of your more calorically dense items! And at room temperature a TB of olive oil is ~13.5g not 15!

    OK, now I am going to actually log this.... <logs in the background>

    And I am coming up with petals @ 130, evoo at 358, mush 50, zuch 55, pasta 946 = 1539

    So, to begin with, if your total weight IS actually 1455, then calories for 436 are: 461.17. Let's call them 465 to account for some moisture loss when the product cooled down if you weighed the finished stuff hot off the stove... but a far cry from 538!

    So while the meal STILL sounds like a good bargain to me... there does seem to exist a numbers issue somewhere! Whether high or low... no clue. It's not as if I've never had trouble myself deciphering cryptic notes and weights when I looked at them after the fact!!! :wink:
  • Roobyzooby
    Roobyzooby Posts: 189 Member
    Why do you need to imput the cooked weight? I add all dry weights, uncooked and thats it. Cook it, I then portion it, I do weigh out to make sure each portion is equal, not just eyeball but only for that reason. So for example if all ingredients added up to 3000, I devided it in to 6 portions, my serving would be 1/6 of the total calories. Perhaps I'm miss reading the original post, but it does sound like you are over complicating things.
  • ktekc
    ktekc Posts: 879 Member
    edited June 2019
    Probably because the weight changes in cooking and if you are dividing it into even servings it wouldn't be a problem but if it weighed 3000 raw and 2200 cooked and you put 3000 servings instead of 2200 it would be way off. I could be wrong but since my # of servings is always the weight in grams i make sure the weight is whats actually being eaten. The first time i had to scoop out an entire batch of chili to figure how many cups it made to figure out # of servings i bought a bigger scale. lol

    eta. Where my husband eats bigger servings than me, even sized servings would make him cry. i can eat 450 grams and log it and he can eat 1000 and it wont mess up the logging of leftovers for me later. Whatever they weigh is my servings.
  • sefajane1
    sefajane1 Posts: 322 Member
    ktekc wrote: »
    Probably because the weight changes in cooking and if you are dividing it into even servings it wouldn't be a problem but if it weighed 3000 raw and 2200 cooked and you put 3000 servings instead of 2200 it would be way off. I could be wrong but since my # of servings is always the weight in grams i make sure the weight is whats actually being eaten. The first time i had to scoop out an entire batch of chili to figure how many cups it made to figure out # of servings i bought a bigger scale. lol

    eta. Where my husband eats bigger servings than me, even sized servings would make him cry. i can eat 450 grams and log it and he can eat 1000 and it wont mess up the logging of leftovers for me later. Whatever they weigh is my servings.

    I do the same. I often batch cook, freezing in whatever containers I have so I always use the total cooked weight as my serving size. That way I can defrost a block of whatever and know how many calories are in it. I also label the freezer bags with the dish name and amount of calories/100g, just in case I don't have access to my recipes.

    It works for me and isn't complicated at all 😊
  • jelleigh
    jelleigh Posts: 743 Member
    Ya I'm cooking for me and my husband and we def do not do equal portions. For that matter, I'm never sure how much of anything I'm wanting to eat until that day/meal when I know how hungry I am and how many calories I have left.

    Thanks for all the help!
  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 8,977 Member
    Roobyzooby wrote: »
    Why do you need to imput the cooked weight? I add all dry weights, uncooked and thats it. Cook it, I then portion it, I do weigh out to make sure each portion is equal, not just eyeball but only for that reason. So for example if all ingredients added up to 3000, I devided it in to 6 portions, my serving would be 1/6 of the total calories. Perhaps I'm miss reading the original post, but it does sound like you are over complicating things.


    That only works if you are eating 1/6 each.

    I do that with some recipes like chilli con carne - I use same ingredients in same amounts and it always gets divided into 3: one for me, one for DH, one leftover. So every serve is the same.

    But things like soups I have different amounts and weighing the finished amount and dividing it by grams is better - ie 2500 g equals 25 serves of 100 g. Then I take a thermos to work, for example, and it might be 5 servings. A mug at home might be 3.5 etc.

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