Tasting food when cooking, for seasoning etc.

sofrances
sofrances Posts: 156 Member
edited March 2022 in Goal: Maintaining Weight
Hi

I've been maintaining for about a year and a half, using MFP. I'm not looking to lose any more weight, but I calorie count pretty precisely to keep myself honest and avoid regain. (i.e. I usually weight out all the food, and then split it into 1 portion per gram, and then weigh my portions, so pretty precise).

I'm recently trying to become a better cook, and lots of advice there says to taste your food when seasoning etc.

However, in the past snarfing down spoonful after spoonful of food while cooking has been a problem behaviour for me. I want to be able to use my taste-buds to learn to cook better, season properly etc. But I definitely don't want weight gain.

Anyone have any advice for how to count these small tastes? Exact precision isn't necessarily required, but some method of keeping myself accountable and honest probably is.

All I can think of e.g. with a soup is to count the number of teaspoons, and then when the dish is finished weight a teaspoon of soup and use that to add portions. Doesn't work so well the less "soupy" the meal is, though.

Either that or just have a strict limit on the number of tastes I'm allowed and deduct e.g. 100 calories from my budget.

Or just accept that perhaps I'm not the sort of person who can allow myself to taste my food while cooking. Being a recovering obese person might somewhat impair ones ability to improve as a cook etc.

I may be overthinking this.

Any advice appreciated.

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Replies

  • Cheesy567
    Cheesy567 Posts: 1,186 Member
    edited March 2022
    Well, when learning to season food, you probably want to taste food. Also learn to check your other senses, smell, look, etc. Good job realizing it’s been a downfall and looking to learn a new habit!

    Maybe keeping a baby spoon for cooking, so tastes are kept tiny. And, you could keep a small container nearby that you’ve tared before cooking, and every taste you take, an equal taste-size goes in that container. Then at the end of meal-prep, that glob is weighed and logged to your meal, and then the food goes in the trash/ compost or added to your meal, your choice.

    Maybe you could add 1/10 of a serving per meal if you’ve forgotten to measure, err on the side of a bit too much. Or round up your serving size to account.

    Being aware and cognizant is the first and best step. You’ll find something that will work for you and be sustainable. Don’t be afraid to try and fail at some options. Let us know what has worked and what hasn’t.
  • mtaratoot
    mtaratoot Posts: 14,302 Member
    sofrances wrote: »

    <snip>

    I'm recently trying to become a better cook, and lots of advice there says to taste your food when seasoning etc.

    However, in the past snarfing down spoonful after spoonful of food while cooking has been a problem behaviour for me. I want to be able to use my taste-buds to learn to cook better, season properly etc. But I definitely don't want weight gain.


    <snip>


    Tasting to adjust seasonings can help create more delicious meals. Snarfing down spoonful after spoonful is not tasting to adjust seasonings! If you're working with calorie dense items, it's clearly bigger issue than for low calorie dishes. An extra couple spoons of vegetables won't be a big deal whereas a couple extra spoons of gravy is.

    I made two batches of soup yesterday. Neither was particularly calorie dense, but certainly they are tasty. One is black bean soup that also has carrots, onions, and lots of garlic. The other was leek and potato soup that also has carrot and onion. I didn't taste either one until the cooking was nearly done, just to see if I needed to, for example, add more cumin to the black bean soup or salt and cayenne to the potato soup. Earlier I spooned out one bean a couple times to see how far along the cooking was going.

    My suggestion would be two-fold. First, be mindful of how often (and when) you sample your food. You can increase enjoyment by getting it right, and tasting it can help. Then, if you want to add some accountability, either just do a quick add of a hundred calories or add 5% to the serving size you take. Then, over time, track how the scale responds based on how far over or under you are (i.e., what you expect the scale should do versus what it actually does) and adjust your "adjustment."
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,377 Member
    Good advice above!

    I'd add this: Give a think to how the tasting fits into your caloric big picture. If you've been calorie counting for a while, you probably have decent intuition about the rough calorie level of a bite, lick or taste (BLT). You can count spoonsful or rough-estimate the weight consumed, ballpark-ish. You know how often you do this BLT stuff (every meal, just dinners, 3 times a week, whatever).

    In that context, what I mean about the caloric big picture, using my own maintenance data:

    I figure my maintenance calories are around 2000 daily. If my BLT is a once-a-week, 200 calories-ish thing, the context is 14,000 calories I can eat per week, so 200-ish calories is about 1.4% of my weekly calories. I can be pretty relaxed about how exact I am in estimating that kind of BLT. It's fine to guess/approximate.

    On the other hand, if it's BLTs every meal, 3 meals a day, every day, at roughly 200 calories per meal, it's going to be much more important to be semi-accurate, because we're talking about maybe 30% of my daily calorie allowance. That would make me much more motivated to use more precise counting methods, from the suggestions above.

    When calorie counting, obviously it's important to be accurate enough to succeed. But it's kind of easy to start feeling like we have to be exactly exact about everything, maybe slip into obsessiveness about details. Thinking about how important any given exactitude is, in the big picture, can provide some useful perspective, IMO.
  • Suzanne_the_foot_lady
    Suzanne_the_foot_lady Posts: 222 Member
    If you are weighing out all the ingredients before you cook, then surely what you are tasting is coming out of your allowence?
    If you are cooking for more than yourself, then just a tiny bit on half a teaspoon near the end of cooking should be sufficient.
    Scarfing down spoonfuls is not tasting, its a bad habit which is threatning your success.
  • sofrances
    sofrances Posts: 156 Member
    Thanks, all. There's some seriously good advice there, and very graciously given (I wouldn't have blamed you for just dismissing me as a complete neurotic :smile:, but I'm very grateful you didn't.)
  • rosebarnalice
    rosebarnalice Posts: 3,488 Member
    I use a chopstick instead of a spoon for cooking tastes. Just dip to coat and check the flavor.

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