Cooked weight
Cooked weight is the weight of food after cooking, which differs from raw weight mainly through water gained or lost; it is only a valid basis for logging when the database entry is also for the cooked food.
Cooked weight is what you can actually measure when someone hands you a plate. It is perfectly usable, as long as the number you match it against was also measured on cooked food.
What cooking does to weight
Boiling and steaming add water: rice, pasta, dal and millets all gain substantially. Grilling, roasting and frying drive water off: meat typically loses 20 to 30 per cent of its weight. Frying does both, losing water and gaining oil, which is why fried food is the hardest case of all.
The mismatch that costs the most
Weighing 200 g of cooked rice and logging it against raw rice roughly triples the real figure. Weighing 150 g of cooked chicken and logging it as raw undercounts it. Both errors are large and both are common, and both come from the same habit of searching a food name and taking the first entry without reading which state it refers to.
The practical rule
For things you cook yourself, weigh raw and log raw. For things served to you already cooked, use a cooked entry and accept a wider margin. For a shared pot, weigh the whole finished dish, add up the raw ingredients that went into it, and divide — which is the method that handles both at once.
Sources
- 1.Food energy: methods of analysis and conversion factors — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
- 2.Indian Food Composition Tables 2017 — ICMR–National Institute of Nutrition
Related reading
- How to calculate the calories in a recipe you cooked
A worked example from a real pot of dal: count the raw ingredients, add the fat, divide by real servings, save the number. Fifteen minutes once per recipe.
- Should you weigh food raw or cooked?
Raw weight is reproducible and matches most database entries. Cooked weight is what you can actually measure. The conversion factors and when each one is right.
- Does cooking change the calories in your food?
Cooking does not destroy calories, but it changes weight, digestibility and how much energy you absorb. What shifts, by how much, and what it means for logging.
- IFCT or USDA: which numbers should you trust?
Two national food composition tables, built for two food supplies. When each one is right, why they disagree about the same food, and what to do about it.