NouriBud
Cooking at home
How to save your own cooked meal
A home-cooked pot is the biggest challenge for a food diary – and the biggest opportunity. Save it once and log it in seconds from then on. You only need to understand what cooking does to the weight.
In short
- Save a pot dish as a recipe; log a simple plate by its ingredients.
- Cooking evaporates water: the dish weighs less, the calories stay – so there are more per 100 g.
- Weighing the finished dish is best; without a scale, portions beat the ingredient total.
- Accuracy without weighing is not a fixed percentage: it matches the share of weight that evaporated.
Two ways: recipe or ingredients
Recipe – when you cook a pot
Goulash, soup, risotto or anything you cook for several portions is best saved as a recipe. Add the ingredients – by search, barcode, photo or manually – with the amounts you actually used. The app adds up the energy of the whole pot. The recipe stays saved; next time you pick it and log your portion.
Individual ingredients – when the meal is simple
Two scrambled eggs and a slice of bread do not need a recipe. Log the ingredients you ate and you are done. A recipe pays off when one cooking session feeds you several times or several people.
Why a cooked dish weighs less
Water evaporates during cooking. A pot that started with 2 kg of ingredients can weigh noticeably less after a long simmer without a lid. Calories do not evaporate – they stay in a smaller weight, so every 100 g of the cooked dish contains more of them. Cooks call it reducing; for your diary it means concentrated calories.
It also works the other way round: rice and pasta absorb water, so cooked they weigh more than dry and have fewer calories per 100 g (white rice about 365 kcal dry vs 130 kcal cooked).
How much water evaporates depends on cooking time, heat, pot size and above all on whether a lid was on. That is why no single number fits every dish.
How accurate is it without a scale?
If you do not weigh the finished dish and use the sum of ingredient weights instead, the error is exactly the share of weight that evaporated. 10 % evaporated → you log 10 % too little. 15 % evaporated → 15 % too little:
| Calculation | kcal per 100 g | 400 g portion |
|---|---|---|
| By cooked weight (correct) | ≈ 106 | ≈ 424 kcal |
| By sum of ingredients | 90 | 360 kcal |
| Difference | you log ~15 % less |
So "about 90 % accurate" only holds for a dish that lost roughly a tenth of its weight – for example after shorter cooking with a lid. A sauce simmered for a long time without a lid can be off by more.
Watch the opposite trap – water. If you pour water into the pot (soup, rice, pasta) and do not log it as an ingredient, the ingredient total will be far smaller than the real weight of the dish. The calories per 100 g then come out too high – the error can even double. If you use the ingredient total, log the water too (it has 0 kcal).
Portions instead of grams. When you divide the pot into equal portions (for example four boxes) and log "1 of 4", evaporation does not matter at all – the calories of the whole pot are simply divided by the number of portions. Accuracy then depends only on how evenly you split it.
Recommended method
- Best: weigh your empty pot once (write it on a sticker underneath), weigh it full after cooking and enter the difference as the weight of the finished dish.
- Without a scale: divide the dish into equal portions and enter the number of portions.
- Fallback: the sum of ingredient weights – including water – knowing that the result is approximate.
- Save the recipe. Next time, adjust any changed amounts and enter the cooked weight again.
Frequently asked questions
Why does a cooked dish have more calories per 100 g than its ingredients?
Water evaporates during cooking but the calories stay. The same energy ends up in less weight, so there is more of it per 100 g.
How accurate is the weight if I do not weigh the dish?
Using the ingredient total, the error equals the share of weight that evaporated – 10 % evaporated means you log 10 % too little. There is no fixed percentage; it depends on cooking time and the lid.
How do I log a pot dish without a scale?
Divide it into equal portions and log the number of portions. Evaporation then does not matter; only how evenly you split the pot.
Sources
This guide is general information for healthy adults, not medical advice. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, have or have had an eating disorder, or need a therapeutic diet, talk to a doctor or registered dietitian.