Custom Recipes: Servings versus grams

When entering a custom recipe and deciding how much of the recipe you want to eat at a sitting, there are two ways to go. The first seems to be what most people choose to do: either enter the recipe and number of desired servings into Cronomenter, then when finished cooking, divide into containers accordingly. The other option is to go by grams. After you've entered your recipe, Cronometer will tell you the total grams the recipe weighs. You can then choose the amount of said recipe you want to consume at any given meal and enter it in your diary.

I prefer the second method. If I am making a large pot of soup or stew (say, over 10 servings), I don't necessarily have enough jars to divide it up into servings. Also, once a recipe has been divided into servings, you are committed to consuming the food in that particular serving size (if you want to track it accurately, anyway) until it is gone. I prefer the flexibility of being able to eat a smaller serving one day, and a larger serving another day, depending on what else I'm planning to consume.

The problem is, Cronometer sometimes calculates the total weight of a recipe completely incorrectly. If you prepare a casserole, for example, from a recipe you've entered in Cronometer, it may tell you that the finished recipe weighs hundreds of grams more than the actual weight on your food scale. This means that - if I track and eat 300 grams of casserole - I am actually consuming many more calories than are appearing in my diary. This problem appears to be because a) Cronometer doesn't account for water that cooks off during cooking and b) some ingredients don't have a weight listed in the database, so they come out as zero.

Cronometer will not let you change the total grams of the recipe. It is set in stone. The only way you can alter it is by adding a dummy entry of water, or a negative dummy entry of water, to make the Cronometer weight match the actual weight.

Has anyone else observed this? How do you deal with it? Or am I the only person that doesn't just divide their food into servings and eat them that way?

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