Portioning recipes?

Side question: What about the difference in cooked weight vs raw weight? How do we get around that?

Like others have said, I weigh the ingredients and enter them into myfitnesspal recipe builder. I weigh the pot/pan. When the meal is cooked, I weigh the entire pan and subtract the weight of the pan (that I wrote down previously). In the recipe builder, it asks how many servings so let's say it's 8 servings. If the weight of my entire casserole is 1200 grams, then 150 grams is an individual serving. I will actually put (150g) in the title of my recipe. That way, when I make the recipe again, I don't need to do quite as much work. I will know that all I need to do is take 150g of that food to have a serving. It does take more work initially but it's nice that I have a very accurate way of knowing how many calories I'm eating. In my opinion it doesn't make sense to spend time weighing out all those ingredients and then just guesstimate your portion size. It's hard to cut exactly 1/12 of a lasagna and that's a high calorie meal. Or a big bowl of soup? How would you scoop out a portion size? That's why I always weigh.

I'm still working on how to figure out portions for food (like non-pureed soup) that isn't homogeneous. Since I'm adding liquid as needed for soups or stew-like dishes, they don't weigh the same every time, so I have to figure out the individual weights for the finished product each time I make a recipe. Also, when I ladle out a serving, it may have more of some ingredients than another serving that weighs the same. (like ending up with more potato versus more mushrooms in a curry) If I try to divide up food fractionally within a casserole pan, a serving doesn't really hold its shape while cutting if it has much liquid in it. So weighing or careful cutting won't give 100% accurate results.

I try to separate foods that are calorie dense for individual weighing, but also keep in mind that probably things average out serving to serving for dishes where that isn't possible. I've been eating lots of soup all winter, and I would have had to puree it all to get servings consistent in calories. Pureed lentil soup. Yum Some recipes just don't lend themselves to perfect calorie calculation at home. It's something to keep in mind if you make a lot of calorie dense recipes and aren't losing weight. And if you're using the nutritional info provided in the recipe, be careful that you get the number of servings per recipe right. My favorite cookbook has a tiny font for recipe size; after I got glasses I saw that it said 1/6th of a recipe, not 1/4th, was a serving. Oops.

I don't mean to be defeatist about weighing food, just to point out it won't be perfect for many recipes, just like estimating exercise calories isn't perfect. It's not something to get too fussed over if you're getting results. At least you're making your own food instead of pre-packaged stuff.

My one semi-helpful suggestion would be baking desserts or higher calorie baked goods as cupcakes or muffins for an easy division. It gives individual servings more easily than slicing, and is convenient and less space demanding when freezing.

ijsantos2005 wrote: »

Side question: What about the difference in cooked weight vs raw weight? How do we get around that?

I thought this was why people were weighing the full pot of food. That would account for steam weight lost. Also allows you to add more water to keep whatever consistency you were looking for, without losing your mind.

Oh, hah! I didn't even realize it was a zombie thread.

I have been doing it by VOLUME. I divide the quantity in the mixed meal (casserole or whatever) into quarters visually, as accurately as I can eyeball it, and then weigh the 1/4. I'm going to eat it all anyway, so within 4 days, I have that total number of calories.