How to calculate the calories in a recipe you cooked

Every calorie app can price a packet of biscuits. None of them can price the dal you made on Tuesday, because that dal is a recipe and the recipe is yours.

This is the calculation, worked through with real numbers. It takes about fifteen minutes the first time and under five thereafter.

Step one: weigh the raw ingredients

Everything that carries calories. Water, salt and spices do not.

A real family dal:

• Toor dal, dry: 180 g
• Onion: 90 g
• Tomato: 120 g
• Cooking oil: 2 tbsp (28 g)
• Ghee for the tadka: 1 tbsp (14 g)
• Garlic, ginger, spices, salt: ignore

Step two: look each one up

Use a composition table for ingredients rather than a user-submitted entry for a finished dish. Ingredients are the one category where published reference data is genuinely reliable, which is the argument in IFCT or USDA: which numbers should you trust.

Food	Serving	kcal	Protein (g)	Carbs (g)	Fat (g)
Toor dal, dry	180 g	603	40	104	2.7
Onion	90 g	45	1.1	10	0.1
Tomato	120 g	24	1.1	4.7	0.2
Cooking oil	28 g	248	0	0	28
Ghee	14 g	126	0	0	14

Source: IFCT 2017

Pot total: 1,046 kcal, 42 g protein, 45 g fat.

Look at where the calories are. The fat is 374 of the 1,046 — over a third of the dish — from two tablespoons of oil and one of ghee. That is the point made in how much oil is actually in your curry, demonstrated rather than asserted.

Step three: divide by real servings

Count the katoris the pot actually filled. Not what the recipe said, not what it looks like it should make.

Say it filled seven katoris.

1,046 ÷ 7 = 149 kcal per katori, with 6 g of protein.

Step four: save it

"My dal = 149 kcal per katori." Put it in your app as a custom food. You will log it dozens of times a year and never do this arithmetic again.

When portions are uneven

Dividing by people assumes everyone ate the same. If they did not, weigh the finished dish instead.

Suppose the pot weighed 1,250 g finished. Then 1,046 ÷ 1,250 = 0.84 kcal per gram. Weigh your own serving — say 210 g — and log 176 kcal.

This is more accurate and slightly more work, and it is the right method when one person in the household eats considerably more or less than the others. The wider context is in tracking calories when one pot feeds four people.

Raw ingredients, not cooked

Always work from raw weights. Cooked weight depends on how much water evaporated, which varies between batches of the same recipe.

The exception is an ingredient you bought already cooked. The conversion factors and the reasoning are in should you weigh food raw or cooked.

Handling the awkward parts

Bone-in meat. Use the weight as bought and pick a table entry that says "with bone", or estimate the meat at about 70 per cent of the purchased weight. This is the edible portion problem.

Deep-fried components. Add 5 to 15 per cent of the item's weight in absorbed oil, since the oil left in the pan is not what went into the food.

Things added at the table. Ghee on the roti, sugar in the chai, pickle. These are logged separately, not in the recipe.

Building the library

The reason this is sustainable: households repeat.

Do one or two recipes a week. After two months, fifteen to twenty dishes have saved numbers and cover most of what you eat. From then on, logging dinner is recall rather than calculation, which is the whole argument in how to count calories in home-cooked food.

When to recalculate

Only when the recipe genuinely changes — a different quantity of oil, cream added, a new ingredient, a doubled batch that produced a different number of servings.

A dal made the same way is the same dal. Small variations in onion size are noise well inside the margin that every food figure carries anyway, as discussed in how accurate are calorie counts, really.