Question about recipe entry

I've had some issues looking up certain foods for recipes - I found this food -

Trader Joe's Soy Chorizo

But the recipe maker won't accept that as an ingredient option for analyzing a recipe - any ideas?

Personally I dislike the recipe analyzer thing as it doesn't recognise half the food I enter as it has half the UK brands and mainly USA brands.  So I tend to put in the item under a general search and then just tag it and add it individually to my log.  Might not be the best idea but you can generally find something similar if you lose the brand name.

I usually end up doing a search for the closest match and then add it by the item number...like this

xxg Trader Joe's soy chorizo[1234] The number being the id number of the item i found.

If your just doing it for yourself and an ingredient has less calories then listed then just ut less in the analyzer.

I don't know what to tell you about the soy chorizo.  I tried it once () and decided to make my own chorizo, from ground chicken.  Essentially you are only adding the calories from the chicken, since the rest of the ingredients are spices.  So when I'm making a recipe using the analyzer, I use ground chicken for the ingredient.

Two things may be stopping you:

First, if it's not recognizing the food itself, put the calorie count food id in brackets.  The id is found in the web address bar.  For the soy chorizo, the web address is http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-trader -joes-soy-chorizo-i131859

Therefore the id is 131859.  List it in your recipe as Soy Chorizo [131859] and it will pull up that exact food.

Second thing, it's really picky about how you enter the measurement.  It's usually best to use ounces or grams.  If you're not sure how to list it, look at the way they list the serving size, and try to enter your quantity using the same formula (ie: in cups if a serving size is in cups, tablespoons if in tablespoons, etc.).  But, it will almost always accept measurements in grams or ounces.

If you're not sure what the hold up is, check the flags next to the recipe item after you say "analyze recipe".  Orange and Red flags mean its having an issue - Red means it can't find the food (use bracketed id to solve this), Orange means it doesn't recognize the measurement used.

Hope that helps!

~Katy

Wooo! thank you loudflower, this is the best answer yet, I believe : ).  The item number is a huge help, I'll remember that for editing, and for next time.

I knew about the flags.. they give me the most problem when dealing with cuts of chicken.