Recipe Calorie Calculator

How to calculate calories in a recipe

Homemade food is the hardest thing to log because no database entry matches your recipe. The fix is simple maths: add up the calories in every ingredient, then divide by how much you ate. The calculator above does that for you.

1. Add each ingredient. Start typing and pick from over 120 common ingredients with values from USDA FoodData Central. Enter the amount in grams, ounces, cups, spoons or pieces. Anything not on the list can be added as a custom row with the calories from its label.
2. Set the number of servings to split the recipe evenly.
3. For the most accurate result, weigh the finished batch and your portion. The calculator then works out calories per 100 g and for your exact portion.

Calculate nutrition facts from a recipe

Once your ingredients are in, the per-serving result works like the main lines of a nutrition facts label: calories, protein, carbohydrates and fat for one serving. That is what you need to log a homemade dish in any calorie tracker, or to share the numbers with someone else who eats it.

Why weighing the cooked batch is more accurate

Servings are rarely equal. One person's bowl of chili is another person's bowl and a half. Cooking also changes weight without changing calories: a pot of chili loses water as it simmers, and rice and pasta gain water as they cook. Calories don't evaporate, so the total stays the same while the weight changes.

That makes the cooked weight the best way to divide. Say your chili has 3,000 calories in total and the finished pot weighs 1,800 g. That is about 167 calories per 100 g, so a 350 g bowl is about 583 calories, whatever size bowl the rest of the family takes.

Common mistakes that throw the numbers off

• Forgetting the oil. A tablespoon of olive oil is about 120 calories. It is the most commonly missed ingredient in home cooking.
• Using cooked weights for raw ingredients. The values here are for raw meat and dry grains and pasta, so weigh them before cooking.
• Counting fat you poured away. If you drain a lot of fat from ground beef, the real total is a little lower than the calculator shows. Leaving it in is the safer, slightly high estimate.
• Measuring by cup instead of weight. A cup of flour can vary by 20% or more depending on how you scoop it. Use grams when you can.

Log it once, eat it all week

Once you know your calories per serving, saving it as a recipe means you never have to work it out again. In Bento Bunny you can also just photograph your bowl or type "a bowl of homemade beef chili" and get an estimate in seconds. To scale a recipe up or down first, try the recipe serving converter.