Recipe Nutrition Calculator: Calories and Macros per Serving
Type an ingredient, enter what it weighs, say how many servings the dish makes, and get the calories and macros for one portion and for the whole pot. Every number comes from USDA food composition data, and the table shows which ingredient is carrying the calories. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere.
1,200 ingredients from USDA. Use the arrow keys and Enter to pick one.
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One serving of your recipe is
—
calories per serving
Add an ingredient to see your numbers.
How we got your number
Each ingredient is its weight in grams × calories per 100 g ÷ 100, from USDA food composition data. Weights are raw weights, before cooking.
Where the calories come from
| Ingredient | Weight | Calories | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Add an ingredient and the biggest calorie contributors appear here, largest first. | |||
Sorted by calories, so the line at the top is the one worth changing if you want the dish lighter.
Full macro breakdown
| Ingredient | Kcal | Protein | Carbs | Fat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Protein, carbs and fat per ingredient show up here. | ||||
Protein and carbs carry about 4 calories a gram, fat about 9, so the macro percentages will not always add up to exactly 100 after rounding.
Weights, ounces and why there are no cups
Switch the toggle at the top to enter ounces instead of grams. One ounce is 28.35 g and one pound is 453.6 g, so a 1 lb pack of mince is 16 oz.
Cups, tablespoons and spoonfuls are volume, not weight. A cup of flour and a cup of sugar differ by around 80 g, so converting them for you would mean guessing a density and building an error into every line. Weigh solids on a kitchen scale. For liquids, 1 ml of water weighs 1 g, so 240 ml of water or milk is close enough to 240 g, and a tablespoon of oil is about 14 g.
Calories per 100 g is the number printed on a pack, and it is the wrong number to cook by. Nobody eats 100 g of a casserole. What you eat is a portion of a finished dish, and the only way to get there is to add up everything that went into the pot and divide by the number of portions it makes. That is all this calculator does, but doing it by hand for eleven ingredients is where most people give up and guess instead.
Weigh raw. A chicken breast loses a quarter of its weight in the oven because water leaves it, not calories, so the cooked meat is denser and more calorific per gram than the raw meat it came from. Dry pasta goes the other way, roughly tripling in weight as it soaks up water, which is why 100 g of cooked pasta has barely a third of the calories of 100 g of dry. Both are true at once, and both stop being a problem the moment you weigh everything before it hits the heat. This calculator assumes raw weights unless you deliberately pick an entry that says cooked, and mixing the two in one recipe is the fastest way to a wrong answer.
The line people get wrong most often is the fat they cook in. Oil is around 120 calories a tablespoon and it disappears into the pan, so it feels free. It is not, and in a vegetable stir fry it is frequently the largest single number on the list. Add the oil that ends up on the plate: all of it for a roast or a tray bake, some of it if you drain the pan. Butter for greasing, the dressing you finish a salad with and the cream stirred in at the end belong in the list too.
One caveat on the data. USDA figures are averages for a food, not for your brand. Two supermarket sausages can differ by 40 per cent, cuts of beef vary with how closely they were trimmed, and packaged labels themselves carry a legal tolerance of about 20 per cent. Consistency beats precision here: weigh the same way every time, and the trend you see week to week will be honest even if any single number is a little off.
More free calculators
See the full list on the calculators page: the daily calorie calculator, the BMR calculator, the BMI calculator, the ideal weight calculator and the calories burned calculator.
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate calories in a homemade recipe?
Weigh every ingredient that goes into the pot, look up the calories per 100 g for each one, multiply by the weight you used, and add the results together. That total belongs to the whole dish. Divide it by the number of servings and you have the figure you actually eat. This calculator does the middle part for you: you type the ingredient, it pulls the USDA numbers, you enter grams or ounces.
How do I work out calories per serving?
Total calories for the whole recipe divided by the number of servings. The only honest way to make the servings equal is to weigh the finished dish and split it by weight, because a ladle of stew and a ladle of stew are rarely the same size. If you cut a tray bake into 12 pieces, 12 is your serving count.
Should I weigh ingredients raw or cooked?
Raw, and that is what this calculator expects. Raw weights are stable: 100 g of dry pasta is always 100 g of dry pasta, while the cooked weight depends on how long it sat in the water. If you only have a cooked weight, use a cooked entry from the list instead, and never mix the two inside one recipe.
Does cooking change the calories?
Cooking does not create or destroy many calories, but it moves water around, so it changes the calories per gram. Roasting drives water out of a chicken thigh, which makes what is left denser and more calorific per gram. Boiling rice or pasta does the opposite. The energy in the pan stays roughly the same unless fat drips away or you add oil, which is why weighing raw and counting the oil separately is the reliable method.
How accurate is this calculator?
The arithmetic is exact. The inputs are averages. USDA figures describe a typical sample of a food, not your brand, your cut of meat or the fat trimmed off it, and food labels themselves are allowed a tolerance of around 20 per cent. For everyday tracking that is close enough to steer by, as long as you weigh consistently and do not switch methods halfway through a week.
Why do you not accept cups and tablespoons?
Because a cup measures volume, not mass, and the same cup holds 120 g of flour, 200 g of sugar or 90 g of cocoa depending on what you scoop and how hard you pack it. Converting cups to grams for solids would guess at a density and quietly add an error to every line of your recipe. Grams and ounces are unambiguous, so this calculator asks for weight.
How should I count the oil I fry in?
Add the oil that ends up in the food, not the oil that stays in the pan. For a stir fry or a tray bake, everything you poured in gets eaten, so add all of it. For shallow frying you might pour off half, so count half. A tablespoon of olive oil is about 14 g and roughly 120 calories, which is often the largest single line in a light recipe.
How this calculator works
Sources
- USDA FoodData Central — the nutrient database behind the food figures. fdc.nal.usda.gov
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Dietary Reference Intakes: acceptable macronutrient distribution ranges. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
This calculator is for general information and is not medical advice. It is not suitable if you are under 18, pregnant or breastfeeding, or being treated for an eating disorder or a condition that affects weight. Speak to your GP or a registered dietitian before acting on the numbers.