Health⏱ 5 min read
How to Calculate the Calories in a Home-Cooked Recipe
Tracking calories in home-cooked food is harder than tracking packaged foods — but a consistent method makes it accurate enough to be useful. Here's a step-by-step process for any recipe.
Calorie tracking in restaurants and home cooking is genuinely harder than reading a packet — but it's also where most people eat most of their calories. Here's a reliable method that's accurate enough to be useful without becoming obsessive.
The Raw vs Cooked Question
The most important decision: do you weigh ingredients raw or cooked? Both approaches work if you're consistent, but raw weighing is generally more accurate because:
- Cooking causes water loss (especially meat), changing weight significantly
- Nutritional databases are typically based on raw weights
- Oil absorbed during cooking is easier to track before it disappears into the food
Standard practice: weigh raw, use raw nutritional data.
Step-by-Step Method
1. List every ingredient with its raw weight
2. Look up calories per 100g for each (use packaging or nutritional database)
3. Calculate calories: (weight ÷ 100) × calories per 100g
4. Sum all ingredients = total recipe calories
5. Divide by servings = calories per serving
Worked Example: Chicken Stir-Fry (Serves 2)
IngredientRaw WeightCal/100gCalories
Chicken breast300g110330
Broccoli150g3451
Bell pepper120g3137
Sesame oil15g884133
Soy sauce30g6018
Jasmine rice (dry)160g360576
Garlic, ginger15g70 est.11
Total1,156 cal
Per serving (÷2): 578 calories
Note: rice is the biggest contributor (576 cal for 160g dry)
— reducing rice to 120g saves ~90 cal per serving
The Oil Problem
Cooking oils are calorie-dense (884 cal/100ml for most oils) and easy to underestimate. A "splash" of olive oil from the bottle is typically 15–30ml — 130–265 calories. This is one of the most common sources of untracked calories in home cooking.
Tip: weigh oil in the pan before and after cooking
Oil absorbed = starting weight − remaining weight in pan
Or: measure with a teaspoon/tablespoon (1 tbsp ≈ 14g oil ≈ 120 cal)
Batch Cooking and Portioning
For batch cooking:
1. Calculate total recipe calories
2. Weigh total cooked dish
3. Weigh each serving portion
4. Calories per portion = (Portion weight ÷ Total weight) × Total calories
Example: Total recipe = 1,800 cal, total cooked weight = 900g
A 300g serving = (300/900) × 1,800 = 600 cal
Useful Calorie Benchmarks for Home Cooking
IngredientCalories per 100g (raw)
Chicken breast (skinless)110
Salmon fillet208
Pasta (dry)352
White rice (dry)360
Potato (raw)77
Onion40
Cheddar cheese403
Olive oil884
Butter717
Double cream469