SANVIMO GUIDES
Should you weigh food raw or cooked?
Rice gets heavier. Meat often gets lighter. The scale changes, even though you are still making the same dinner.
Keep the measurement and the food entry together
If you weigh dry rice, use a dry rice entry. If you only know the cooked weight, use a suitable cooked entry. One hundred grams before cooking and one hundred grams afterwards are not the same portion.
For meat, also match preparation and edible parts: bone-in or boneless, skin-on or skinless. Similar names can describe different compositions.
| What you weighed | Which entry to use |
|---|---|
| Dry rice before cooking | Dry rice |
| Cooked rice on a plate | Matching cooked rice |
| Raw boneless meat | The same cut, raw |
| Your own finished dish | Your recipe with its measured cooked weight |
What water changes
Grains can absorb water, while roasting can remove moisture. This changes how much of the original food is present in each 100 g. Plain water adds no calories, but it can make a batch heavier or lighter.
Cooking can change composition too: discarded fat or liquid removes material, while frying oil adds it. Saying that total calories always stay the same would be misleading.
A worked example, not a universal conversion
Imagine 100 g of dry grain with 350 kcal. After cooking with water, the batch weighs 300 g. If no nutrient-containing material was added or discarded, the estimated batch total remains about 350 kcal. A 150 g serving is half of it: about 175 kcal.
These are illustrative numbers, not a reference value for all rice. Your pot may produce a different yield. A fixed rule such as “multiply dry weight by three” cannot account for every variety and cooking method.
Log the batch you actually made
Weigh the ingredients and add the matching food entries to your recipe. After cooking, weigh the finished food without its container. Update that yield next time if the batch turns out differently.
Enter the portion you ate. Do not add the raw ingredients again on top of the recipe portion: that would count them twice. For evenly mixed food, your share is portion weight divided by finished batch weight.
When the raw weight is no longer available
Use a suitable cooked food entry and the weight you can measure. Compare preparation and composition; treat the result as an estimate when important details are unknown.
Do not automatically swap grams for millilitres: one measures mass, the other volume. Weigh the empty pot or tare your scale instead of guessing its weight. These habits often help more than an extra decimal place.