Recipe calorie calculator: per serving or 100 g

How to count a homemade dish

1. Weigh each ingredient as it goes in. Meat and vegetables raw, pasta, rice and dried beans dry: that is how their values are listed. Choose a food from the list to fill in its USDA value, or type your own food and the kcal per 100 g from its label.
2. Add them up. "Use this total" puts the recipe's calories in the calculator.
3. Weigh the cooked food. Weigh the empty pot before you start and the pot with the food at the end; the difference is the cooked weight. "Weighing it in the pot?" does that subtraction for you.
4. Divide. Total calories ÷ cooked weight gives calories per 100 g, and × your portion's weight gives your portion. For equal servings, divide the total by their number.

Why the cooked weight matters

Cooking changes weight, not calories. Meat loses water in the pan, and rice and pasta soak water up, so 100 g of the cooked dish holds a different amount of energy than 100 g of the raw ingredients. Dividing the total by the cooked weight is what keeps your portion right. The raw to cooked weight converter shows how much common foods shrink or grow, and should you weigh food raw or cooked? explains which number to use when.

A worked example

The calculator's own example: a recipe of 1800 kcal that weighs 1200 g once cooked has 1800 ÷ 1200 × 100 = 150 kcal per 100 g, so a 350 g portion is about 525 kcal. Four equal servings would be 450 kcal each.

Adding up the ingredients works the same way. Take 500 g of raw skinless chicken breast (600 kcal), 250 g of raw white rice (912.5 kcal), 150 g of onion (60 kcal), 150 g of carrot (61.5 kcal) and 30 g of olive oil (265.2 kcal). Together that is 1899.2 kcal. Cooked, the food weighs 1450 g, because the rice has taken up water: 130.98 kcal per 100 g, and 458.43 kcal in a 350 g portion.

Sharing a recipe

After a calculation, "Copy a link to this recipe" copies an address that carries the recipe inside it: the ingredients, the total, the cooked weight and your portion. Open it on another device and the calculator fills itself in. The recipe lives in the part of the address after the #, which your browser never sends to a server, so nothing is stored anywhere.

What it can't tell you

The calculator assumes the ingredients are spread evenly through the dish, which is close for soups and stews and less so for layered dishes. Oil left in the pan counts as eaten unless you leave it out; the cooking oil calculator works out what really went in. USDA values are averages, so a label on the pack you used is always the better number.

Should I weigh ingredients raw or cooked?

Raw, and dry for pasta, rice and pulses, because that is how the values in the list are given. Then weigh the whole dish once it is cooked. Mixing the two, such as cooked rice with a raw value, is the most common way a homemade count goes wrong.

Why is my result different from a recipe website's?

A website usually divides by the number of servings it suggests, not by what the dish weighs in your kitchen. Your pot, your heat and your cooking time change how much water leaves or stays, so the cooked weight you measure is the one that fits your food.

Can I use ounces?

Yes. Choose ounces and every weight, including the ingredients and the pot, is read in ounces. The calculator converts to grams for the arithmetic.

Sources

• USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy, for the ingredient list, including the example: chicken breast, raw, white rice, raw, onion, carrot and olive oil. Every food in the list keeps its USDA record number in the tool's data.

For the whole method with a real dish, read how to count calories in homemade food.