Free tool
Indian food calorie calculator
Add up an Indian meal the way it is actually served: rotis by the piece, dal and sabzi by the katori, biryani by the plate. You get a calorie range for the whole meal rather than a single number that pretends every kitchen is the same.
Updated
How to use it
Choose a dish in the serving closest to yours, then set how many. Three rotis is “1 plain roti” × 3. Half a plate of biryani is 0.5.
A katori here means a standard steel bowl of about 150 ml. If yours is bigger, adjust the number: 1.5 for a generous bowl. How much is 1 katori? →
Every figure matches the serving tables on the calorie reference pages.
Why a range
The same dal is not the same dal.
Indian home cooking has no standard serving. The katori is a different size in every kitchen, the tadka might be a teaspoon of oil or three, and a roti from one house can be half the size of a roti from the next. A calculator that tells you “your lunch is 512 calories” is quietly guessing on all of that.
So this adds up the low and high end of each dish separately. If your cooking is light on oil, trust the lower half. If it is restaurant food, trust the upper half. Restaurants use roughly twice the fat a home cook would.
What common Indian meals come to
Some reference points, built from the same figures the calculator uses. They are useful for a quick sense of scale before you add up your own plate.
| Meal | What is in it | Calories |
|---|---|---|
| Simple home lunch | 3 rotis, 1 katori dal, 1 katori dry sabzi | 410–670 |
| Rice plate | 1 cup rice, 1 katori rajma, 1 katori curd | 510–650 |
| South Indian breakfast | 3 idlis, 1 katori sambar, coconut chutney | 345–545 |
| Masala dosa breakfast | 1 masala dosa, 1 katori sambar, coconut chutney | 430–710 |
| Poha and chai | 1 plate poha, 1 cup chai with sugar | 310–420 |
| Paratha breakfast | 2 aloo parathas, 1 katori curd | 590–820 |
| Restaurant thali | Standard veg thali with a sweet | 900–1,300 |
| Chaat evening | 1 plate pani puri, 1 samosa | 350–530 |
The biggest single variable across all of these is fat: ghee on the roti, oil in the tadka, butter on the pav. If you want a tighter number, that is the thing to pay attention to. The full Indian food calorie chart →
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate calories in Indian food?
Break the meal into countable parts (rotis, katoris of dal and sabzi, a cup of rice) and add typical values for each. That is what this calculator does. For a dish you cook often, you can go further and work out calories per serving from the ingredients with the recipe calorie calculator.
How many calories are in a normal Indian meal?
A home-cooked lunch or dinner of rotis or rice with dal and sabzi is usually 450–700 calories. Restaurant meals of the same dishes are often 800–1,200, mainly because of the extra oil, butter and cream.
Which Indian foods are lowest in calories?
Steamed and boiled dishes: idli, dhokla, plain dal, rasam, sprouts, curd and dry sabzis made with little oil. The highest are fried snacks, sweets, parathas with butter, and restaurant gravies.
Why is roti not listed separately in the reference pages?
It has its own detailed guide. See how many calories in a roti for 1 to 4 rotis, with and without ghee.
Is anything I enter saved?
No. It runs in your browser, there is no sign-up, and nothing is sent anywhere or stored.
Next step
Or just say what you ate.
Choosing from a list works once. For every meal, type or say “3 rotis, dal, bhindi and curd” and BetterCal logs it with calories and macros, estimated for Indian portions and cooking. Free to start on iPhone and Android.
