Measuring rice and pasta - before or after cooking?

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  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,170 Member
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    CynthiaHartung wrote: »
    It doesn't work for me to measure before because I am making a whole box of pasta and then trying to eat one serving. However, most often I cannot find the cooked weights on my fitness pal. Any suggestions?

    Weigh the pasta uncooked. Cook the pasta. Weigh the pasta again (drained). The cooked pasta has the same number of calories as the raw pasta, it's just heavier because of more water content. Because water content can vary (depending on cooking time, for example), the dry weight is more accurate as a gauge of calories.

    Let's pretend you have 200g of raw pasta, maybe 740 calories. Cook it, now it's maybe 470g, but still 740 calories. Weigh your portion (cooked), let's stay that's 97g. You ate 97 divided by 470 of the pasta, or 0.206 of it, so the calories in your portion were 0.206 times 740, or about 152 calories. (I did some rounding in there.)

    Yeah, that's arithmetic. Calorie counting has made me better at arithmetic, which is a useful skill in other ways. Double win, I know my calorie intake, and I'm better at arithmetic. :lol:
  • drana325
    drana325 Posts: 42 Member
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    Mrp has calorie measurements for both cooked and uncooked rice. Select cooked if. You measured cooked rice. Select dry if you measured dry.
  • wizzybeth
    wizzybeth Posts: 3,573 Member
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    CynthiaHartung wrote: »
    It doesn't work for me to measure before because I am making a whole box of pasta and then trying to eat one serving. However, most often I cannot find the cooked weights on my fitness pal. Any suggestions?

    Do you search for pasta and then scroll to find cooked? Or do you search for "pasta, cooked"?

    I have found entries for cooked pasta and rice
  • MsCzar
    MsCzar Posts: 1,042 Member
    edited January 29
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    CynthiaHartung wrote: »
    It doesn't work for me to measure before because I am making a whole box of pasta and then trying to eat one serving. ... Any suggestions?

    If you have a good food scale, measuring a single serving out of entire package is Math 101. If a whole box is 8 servings totaling 1600 calories, just weigh the cooked amount before adding sauce or anything else and figure out your portion. You could get fancy with the exact number in grams or just make it easy and figure out the fraction. If you divide the cooked weight by 8 you'd have one serving or 200 calories of pasta. If you know how many calories are in your entire sauce, just add that number to the cooked total and divide the same way.

  • mtaratoot
    mtaratoot Posts: 13,247 Member
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    CynthiaHartung wrote: »
    It doesn't work for me to measure before because I am making a whole box of pasta and then trying to eat one serving. However, most often I cannot find the cooked weights on my fitness pal. Any suggestions?

    Why not just weigh out one serving and cook that? It uses less water, and you get FRESH pasta.

    Pro tip: The instructions tell you to boil in a lot of water. You can use less water, and you can actually get it up to a boil, leave it for a minute, turn the heat off, put the lid on, and let it cook that way. It may take a couple minutes longer, and you can test it for doneness. This saves water and energy and makes it really easy to cook one serving (56 grams dry).
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,398 Member
    edited January 29
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    mtaratoot wrote: »
    CynthiaHartung wrote: »
    It doesn't work for me to measure before because I am making a whole box of pasta and then trying to eat one serving. However, most often I cannot find the cooked weights on my fitness pal. Any suggestions?

    Why not just weigh out one serving and cook that? It uses less water, and you get FRESH pasta.

    Pro tip: The instructions tell you to boil in a lot of water. You can use less water, and you can actually get it up to a boil, leave it for a minute, turn the heat off, put the lid on, and let it cook that way. It may take a couple minutes longer, and you can test it for doneness. This saves water and energy and makes it really easy to cook one serving (56 grams dry).

    Another, not quite so precise option if you cook for someone else as well: Cook your pot of pasta. Serve the food to yourself and the other one. Count the serving spoons, like you 2, them 3. You know the calories of the whole pot, and now you only need 2/5 of it. This is how I lost weight.

    If it's just for you but you cook for 2-3 days then it's the same but more precise. You know the calories of the whole put and lot the amount divided by the number of days. Yeah, you might be a bit over or under on one day, but it evens out on the second or third. This is also what I do with bread: weight the whole thing and divide by number of slices. No need to weight the slices every day.

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