| Type of Dish | Percent Weight Loss |
| Beef Stew or Beef Casserole | 30 |
| Bolognese Sauce, with meat | 32 | Cauliflower Cheese | 15 |
| Cheese Sauce | 15 |
| Chilli, meat or vegetable | 30 |
| Curry, meat or vegetable | 30 |
| Custard | 21 |
| Fruit Cake | 5 |
| Fruit Crumble | 7 |
| Fruit Pie | 4 |
| Irish Stew | 24 |
| Lancashire Hotpot | 20 |
| Lasagne | 26 |
| Milk Pudding | 19 |
| Moussaka | 22 |
| Nut Roast | 13 |
| Omelette | 6 |
| Pancakes, sweet, savoury or stuffed | 20 |
| Pork Casserole | 20 |
| Quiche, cheese | 10 |
| Quiche, Lorraine | 26 |
| Risotto | 34 |
| Samosas | 14 |
| Scones | 19 |
| Scrambled Egg | 11 |
| Sponge Cake | 13 |
| Sweet and Sour Pork | 28 | Vegetable Casserole | 15 |
| White Sauce, sweet or savoury | 18 |
| Yorkshire Pudding | 16 |
A few recipes will gain weight on cooking. Steamed sponge pudding, for example, will gain about 4% water. Dumplings will gain about 53% water. For these types of dishes, add this percentage to the ingredients list and then set the water loss on cooking to zero.
When cooking single ingredients such as rice or pasta, these will gain weight, as water is absorbed. The mean percent change is shown below:
| Food | Percent Weight Change |
| Spaghetti, white, dried, boiled | +113 |
| Spaghetti, egg, white, fresh boiled | + 82 |
| Spaghetti, wholewheat, dried, boiled | +130 |
| Macaroni, dried, boiled | +146 |
| Fusilli, dried, boiled | +123 |
| Fusilli, fresh, boiled | + 82 |
| Tagliatelle, dried, boiled | +127 |
| Tagliatelle, fresh, boiled | + 83 |
| Brown rice, boiled | +153 |
| White rice, easy cook, boiled | +177 |
When using WISP to analyse a recipe containing pasta or rice, where the ingredient weight is for the raw food, this should be handled as follows:
Consider a wholemeal pasta which has a gain figure of +130%. If you had, say, 50g of raw pasta which was placed into the dish, you would need to add 65g of water to the recipe, which represents the weight gain of the 50g of raw pasta on cooking.
The formula for the amount of water is : (Original weight of ingredient) x (Gain figure/100)
i.e., in this case 50 x 130/100 = 65g.
This additional water ensures that the nutrition concentration is correct and also that the yield comes out right (i.e., the number of servings the full dish provides).
There may already be water in the dish, but this is unaffected. Also, the whole dish may have a further weight loss on cooking, but this too is not affected by the above.
References
Food Standards Agency. McCance and Widdowson's The Composition of Foods (6th summary edition). Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry, 2002
Holland B, Welch AA, Unwin ID, Buss DH, Paul AA, Southgate DAT. McCance & Widdowson’s The Composition of Foods (5th edition). Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry, 1991.
