Free tool
Recipe calorie calculator
Home-cooked food has no label and no standard serving. Add up what went into the pot, weigh what came out of it once, and this gives you calories per 100 g, per portion, or per katori — the only honest way to price an uneven homemade serving.
Why the cooked weight matters
Cooking changes weight but not calories. Water boils off a curry; rice and dal absorb it. Either way the energy that went into the pot is the energy that comes out of it.
So the arithmetic is simple: total the ingredients, weigh the finished dish once, and you have a calories-per-gram figure that stays true no matter how unevenly you serve it.
This is the one place a kitchen scale genuinely earns its keep — one weighing prices a week of portions.
Ingredient calories
Rough figures for the usual suspects.
Enough to fill the form without looking anything up. Dry weights unless stated, because that is what you measure before it goes in the pot.
| Ingredient | Amount | Calories |
|---|---|---|
| Toor / moong / masoor dal, dry | 100 g | ~340 |
| Rajma or chole, dry | 100 g | ~330 |
| Rice, dry | 100 g | ~350 |
| Atta (wheat flour) | 100 g | ~340 |
| Oil or ghee | 1 tbsp | ~120 |
| Onion | 1 medium | ~45 |
| Tomato | 1 medium | ~25 |
| Potato | 1 medium | ~130 |
| Paneer | 100 g | ~290 |
| Chicken, raw boneless | 100 g | ~110 |
| Milk, full fat | 100 ml | ~65 |
| Cream | 1 tbsp | ~50 |
| Curd | 100 g | ~60 |
| Sugar | 1 tsp | ~20 |
Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate calories per serving of a homemade dish?
Add up the calories of every ingredient that went in, weigh the finished dish, and divide to get calories per gram. Multiply by the weight of your serving. Dividing by the number of servings works too, but only if the servings are genuinely equal.
Should I weigh ingredients raw or cooked?
Raw, going into the pot — that is where the calorie figures on packets refer to. Then weigh the whole dish once it is cooked. Mixing the two up is the most common error here: rice roughly triples in weight when cooked, so a raw figure applied to a cooked weight is three times wrong.
Do I need to subtract the weight of the pot?
Yes. Weigh the empty pot first and subtract, or use the tare button on the scale. Forgetting this is the second most common error, and it makes every serving look far lighter in calories than it is.
What about oil left in the pan?
For a dal or curry, all of it ends up in the dish, so count it all. For something shallow-fried and lifted out, a portion stays behind — counting roughly three quarters of the oil is a reasonable assumption and better than ignoring it.
Do I have to do this for every meal?
No. Do it once for the four or five dishes you cook regularly and you have priced most of your week. After that, log the dish by name and portion — logging home-cooked food covers the routine.
Next step
Skip the arithmetic entirely.
Describe the dish in a sentence and BetterCal estimates the calories and macros. Free to start on iPhone and Android.
