Recipe calorie calculator
Add what goes in the pot, say how many servings it makes, and get calories and macros per serving. USDA data, no signup, nothing leaves your browser.
Search 6,781 whole foods and staples from USDA FoodData Central. Try “olive oil”, “chicken breast raw”, or “all-purpose flour”.
Your ingredients
Nothing added yet. Search above to add your first ingredient, including the oil and butter you cook with.
For the most accurate split, weigh the finished dish and divide by this number.
Per serving
0cal
0 cal in the whole recipe
Macros per serving
0g
Protein
0g
Carbs
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Fat
Add ingredients to see the breakdown. Totals cover what goes into the pot, so include cooking oil and butter.
This is the careful way to do it, and it takes a few minutes. Tek estimates a plated meal from a photo when you do not have the recipe.
How to calculate calories in a recipe
The method is simple arithmetic. Total the calories of every ingredient that goes into the dish, then divide by the number of servings it produces. A calculator only saves you the lookups.
Accuracy comes from two habits rather than from better math. The first is weighing ingredients in grams instead of using volume where you can, because a cup of flour can vary by a third depending on how it is packed. The second is logging the fats. Oil, butter, and cream are calorie dense and easy to leave out, and they are the single most common reason a homemade meal turns out to contain far more than expected.
Weigh ingredients raw and choose the raw entry to match. Cooking drives off water, so a raw and a cooked weight of the same food are not interchangeable. If you only know the cooked weight, pick a cooked entry rather than adjusting by hand.
Dividing into servings is the last place error creeps in. Cutting a tray of lasagne into six pieces by eye produces six different portions. Weighing the finished dish and dividing that weight by your serving count is more reliable, and it lets you log a second helping honestly.
For setting the daily target this recipe has to fit inside, use the calorie deficit calculator, or read how many calories to lose weight.
Questions, answered
How do I calculate the calories in a recipe?
Add up the calories of every ingredient you put in the pot, then divide by the number of servings the recipe makes. That is exactly what this calculator does. The part people get wrong is forgetting the cooking fat, the oil in the pan, and anything added at the table.
Where does the nutrition data come from?
Every ingredient comes from USDA FoodData Central, the same reference database Tek uses to ground recognized foods in the app. Each entry links back to its USDA record so you can check the source yourself.
Should I weigh ingredients raw or cooked?
Weigh raw whenever you can, and pick the raw entry to match. Cooking mostly changes water content, so 100 grams of raw chicken and 100 grams of cooked chicken are not the same amount of food. If you only have the cooked weight, choose a cooked entry rather than converting in your head.
Does cooking change the calories?
Not meaningfully for the food itself, since energy is not lost to heat. What changes is weight, through water loss, and what you add. Oil absorbed while frying, butter in the pan, and rendered fat you pour off all move the real number, so log the fat you actually use.
How accurate is this?
It is more accurate than estimating a finished dish by eye, because you are measuring the inputs rather than guessing the output. The remaining error comes from natural variation between ingredients, imprecise measuring, and uneven serving sizes. Treat the per-serving figure as a good estimate, not a lab result.
How do I split a recipe into servings?
The cleanest method is to weigh the finished dish, then divide that total weight by the number of servings to get a gram weight per portion. Counting servings by eye is where most of the error creeps in, especially with dishes that are hard to divide evenly like stews and casseroles.
For the meals you did not cook.
Ingredient math works when you own the recipe. When you do not, Tek estimates the plate from a photo, shows you what it assumed, and lets you correct any item before it lands in your diary.