Recipe calorie calculator
Add up the calories of the ingredients, weigh the finished dish and divide one by the other. The calculator does the arithmetic and gives calories per 100 g and per serving.
Take chicken with rice for four: 500 g of chicken breast, 200 g of dry white rice, 2 tablespoons of oil, salt and spices. Count the ingredients as they go into the pan.
Chicken breast: about 600 kcal. Dry rice: about 720 kcal. Oil: about 240 kcal. That makes roughly 1,560 kcal for the whole dish, and the total will not change however much water the rice absorbs.
How it works
- Add up the calories of the ingredients, raw and dry.
- Weigh the whole cooked dish: in this example it came to about 1,050 g.
- Divide: 1,560 ÷ 1,050 ≈ 1.49 kcal per gram. A 300 g serving is about 445 kcal.
Three places the count goes wrong
Grains counted as cooked. Use the figure for cooked rice with the weight of dry rice and you get about a third of the real number.
Oil left out. “Most of it stayed in the pan” is rarely true: most of it ends up in the food.
Servings divided by eye. Dividing by weight takes the same ten seconds and gives numbers you can compare from one day to the next.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I calculate the calories in a recipe?
- Add up the calories of the ingredients raw and dry, weigh the finished dish and divide the total by its weight. Multiply the result by the weight of your serving.
- Why use the dry weight of grains?
- Because food tables give the calories of dry grain: cooked rice has about three times fewer calories per 100 g because of the water it has absorbed.
- Do the calories change as a dish cools?
- No. The weight drops as water evaporates, so calories per 100 g rise slightly, but the calories in the whole dish stay the same.
Further reading
- How to count calories in homemade food
- Raw or cooked weight: how to count grains, pasta and meat
- How many calories frying adds
More calculators: Exercise calorie calculator, Post-workout protein calculator, Raw vs cooked weight calculator, Sugar calculator: how much a day.
This calculator gives an estimate for general information. It is not medical advice, a diagnosis, or a prescription for treatment or a diet, and it does not replace a consultation with your doctor. If you have a health condition, are pregnant, take medication, or follow a diet prescribed to you, decisions about food belong with your doctor.