Batch cooking that still hits your macros

The method: total, weigh, divide

A batch hits your numbers when every portion is the same fraction of the pot, and you know what the pot contains. That takes three steps.

1. Total the recipe from raw. Add up calories, protein, carbohydrate and fat for every ingredient as you put it in, using raw weights or the package label. This is the pot’s full nutrition.
2. Weigh the finished pot. Put the empty pot on a scale first and note its weight, then weigh it full and subtract.
3. Divide by cooked grams. Divide the pot’s totals by its finished weight to get numbers per gram, then weigh each portion to the amount that gives you your target.

Here is a worked example. The numbers are illustrative, a stew we made up to show the arithmetic. Say the raw ingredients total 2,400 calories, 180 g protein, 240 g carbohydrate and 80 g fat. The 4/4/9 check works: 180 × 4 + 240 × 4 + 80 × 9 = 720 + 960 + 720 = 2,400 (21 CFR 101.9). The finished stew weighs 2,000 g.

Why raw and cooked numbers differ

Cooking moves water. Meat loses moisture and sometimes fat; rice, pasta and beans absorb water. USDA publishes cooking-yield tables for meat and poultry that report, cut by cut, the overall change in weight along with the moisture and fat change (USDA cooking yields). The nutrients in the food mostly stay put while its weight changes, so 100 g of raw chicken and 100 g of cooked chicken are different amounts of food.

The practical rule: use raw entries with raw weights, and cooked entries with cooked weights, and never mix them. The pot method sidesteps the problem, because you total from raw and divide by the finished weight.

How long it keeps

The USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service publishes a cold-storage chart. These are rows for cooked foods, from its fact sheet Basics for Handling Food Safely (revised June 2011) (USDA FSIS, Basics for Handling Food Safely).

The same fact sheet gives the handling rules that make those times valid.

• Keep the refrigerator at 40 °F or below and the freezer at 0 °F or below, and check with an appliance thermometer.
• Discard food left out more than 2 hours, or 1 hour if it was above 90 °F.
• Put leftovers in shallow containers and into the refrigerator or freezer right away so they cool quickly.
• Use cooked leftovers within 4 days, and reheat them to 165 °F.

General guidance, not medical advice. If you are pregnant, or have a condition that affects your immune system, ask your clinician about food safety. Check the current USDA FSIS pages for any updates to these times.

A planning habit that helps

Portion into containers the day you cook, weigh each one, and label it with the date and its calories and protein. Eat the early-week portions first, and put the ones you will not get to within four days in the freezer on day one, not on day four.

How we use this

MacroCrafted builds a recipe from gram weights and checks the whole thing against your targets, which is the same total-then-divide logic. You can do it with a spreadsheet and a scale, and the arithmetic is identical.