You made a pot of chili. You bought every ingredient, you read every label, you know exactly how much beef went in. Then four people ate out of it, somebody went back for seconds, and a container of it went into the fridge. You know everything about the pot and almost nothing about your bowl.
This is the other half of not knowing the portion. That post was about food someone else made, where you're guessing at the ingredients and the share both. Here the ingredients are the easy part. The share is the whole problem, and it's a much more solvable one than it feels like.
Start with the pot
Here's a fairly ordinary chili, with every figure from USDA data:
- 2 lb of 85% lean ground beef, raw — about 1,950 calories
- 1 tablespoon of olive oil — about 120 calories
- a large onion and a green pepper — about 85 calories between them
- two cans of kidney beans, drained, about 480g — about 595 calories
- a 28 oz can of crushed tomatoes — about 255 calories
- 3 tablespoons of chili powder — about 70 calories
- a cup of water
That's about 3,070 calories in the pot, at 161g fat · 193g carbs · 226g protein. If you multiply those macros out you'll land a little higher, which is normal for database figures and has a reason.
Notice where it comes from. The beef is nearly two thirds of the pot by itself, and the onion, pepper and spices together are under 160 calories. If you're going to be careful about one thing, be careful about the meat: how much of it, and how lean. Swap the 85% beef for 70% and the pot gains about 1,060 calories, which works out to roughly 220 calories in a big bowl. No amount of care about your ladle will make up for getting that wrong.
One thing that moves the other way: if you pour the fat off after browning, some of those calories leave the pot. How much depends on the beef and the pan, so I wouldn't try to subtract it. The ingredient total just runs a little high, and a little high is the safe direction to be wrong in.
Weigh the pot, not the ingredients
The ingredients weighed about 2,730g going in. The chili coming out weighs less, because water simmers off, and how much less depends on how long it went and whether the lid was on. That's why you can't divide by the ingredient weight. It's the raw or cooked problem again, just for a whole recipe instead of a chicken breast.
So weigh the finished chili. Weigh the empty pot once, write the number on a piece of tape on the bottom, and from then on any finished pot is one subtraction. If your scale tops out before a full pot does, ladle the chili into a container you've weighed instead.
Say this one came out at 2,400g. That makes it about 128 calories per 100g, and that one figure is all you need for every bowl that comes out of it, tonight's and the leftovers on Thursday.
Your bowl goes on the scale like anything else. 500g of this chili is about 640 calories, at 34g fat · 40g carbs · 47g protein. It takes about ten seconds, and it's the most accurate number in this post.
Why "serves six" doesn't
The obvious shortcut is to decide the pot serves six and log a sixth. That gets you about 510 calories, which is fine if your bowl was a sixth of the pot. It almost never is. Nobody serves out a pot in even shares. The cook takes a big one, the kids get less, somebody goes back for more, and some of it goes in the fridge.
Against the 500g bowl above, the sixth comes up about 130 calories short. The worse part is that the error isn't random. If you're the one who made it and you're the one who's hungry, your bowl is probably bigger than an even share, and it'll be bigger every time you make it.
If you didn't weigh anything
Sometimes the chili's gone before you think of the scale. You can still do better than a blind guess.
Start from what you're sure of: the pot, about 3,070 calories. Then bound your share. Four of you ate and there's a container in the fridge, so an even share would be about a fifth. But you had one big bowl, and you know it was big. An even share is the floor here, not the middle, so call it somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the pot: between about 615 calories and about 770 calories.
Take the middle: about 690 calories. Then write down what you assumed, "a bit more than a fifth of the pot," so that if you find out the container in the fridge was bigger than you thought, you know what to correct.
The midpoint is the guess least likely to be far off in either direction, and saying what it assumed turns it into a number you can fix later instead of one you just have to live with.
Make it once, log it the same way every time
If chili is a regular thing at your house, you don't need to redo any of this. The per-100g figure from one pot is close enough for the next one, as long as the recipe doesn't change much. A meal you eat every week should come out the same number every week, and it matters more for your trend that it's consistent than that it's exactly right.
This is also how I built Graham to handle it. Tell him what went in the pot and roughly how much of it was yours, and he'll work the figure out the same way, say what share he assumed, and mark it as an estimate so it shows a tilde in your log. If you weighed your bowl, give him the grams and he'll use those instead of a share. Either way the number comes with a handle on it.
What I'm not telling you
None of this makes a homemade pot as exact as a label. Canned beans drain differently, a "large" onion isn't a fixed weight, and cooked weight changes with the stove. If you need numbers you can stake something on, weigh everything going in and the pot coming out, every time.
For most people most of the time, though, the pot is the thing you know best and your bowl is the only thing you need. Weigh one or bound the other, and a dinner you cooked yourself stops being the hardest meal of the week to log.
— Ryan