Recipe Nutrition Calculator

A recipe nutrition calculator for home cooking

This recipe nutrition calculator works out the calories and nutrients in a dish you cook yourself. Add each ingredient with the amount you actually use — “1 cup oats”, “2 bananas”, “1 tablespoon butter” or grams — say how many servings the recipe makes, and you get calories, protein, carbohydrate, fibre, sugars, fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, vitamin D, calcium, iron and potassium per serving, for the whole pot and per 100 g.

Ingredient values come from about 300 foods in USDA FoodData Central, the US Department of Agriculture’s public-domain food composition database, including Indian staples such as atta, dal, paneer and ghee. A Nutrition Facts preview shows how the per-serving numbers would look after FDA rounding, and one click sends them to the nutrition label generator to print a label. It is free, needs no account and keeps your recipe in your browser.

How to use the Recipe Nutrition Calculator

1. Type the recipe name and how many servings it makes.
2. Search an ingredient, choose a household portion or grams, enter the amount and press Add ingredient. Repeat for everything that goes in, including oil, butter and sugar.
3. For something not in the list, open Add your own and type its weight, calories and macros from the pack.
4. Optionally weigh the finished dish and enter the cooked weight, so per-100 g figures and serving weight match what you serve.
5. Read the per-serving result, the full nutrient table and the label preview; press Make a nutrition label or Copy summary.

Recipe Nutrition Calculator features

How recipe nutrition is calculated

Each ingredient’s nutrients per 100 g are scaled to the weight you add: nutrient = value per 100 g × grams ÷ 100. The calculator adds every ingredient to get the whole recipe, then divides by the number of servings. For example, the sample banana oat pancakes use 156 g of dry oats at 389 kcal per 100 g, which is 607 kcal; with the bananas, eggs, milk, butter and honey the batch comes to about 1,280 kcal, or 320 kcal in each of four servings.

Cooking changes weight more than nutrients: rice and dal absorb water, a curry reduces as it simmers. That is why the totals are based on raw ingredients, and the optional cooked weight is used only to work out serving size and per-100 g values. Vitamins sensitive to heat can drop during cooking; this tool does not apply retention factors.

Added sugars and trans fat

USDA’s food tables report total sugars but not “added sugars”, so the calculator counts the sugars of sweetener ingredients — white or brown sugar, jaggery and honey — as added, and lets you type any other added sugar such as syrup or sweetened condensed milk. US survey foods also do not report trans fat; if your recipe uses margarine, shortening or a packaged ingredient, type the trans fat from its label. The sugar intake calculator shows how a serving fits the WHO and NHS limits.

Tips for accurate results

• Weigh ingredients in grams where you can — a “cup” of flour varies by 20% or more depending on how it is filled.
• Count the cooking fat. One tablespoon of oil or ghee adds about 120 kcal (USDA), often the biggest error in home recipes.
• Pick the description that matches the state you use: dry oats vs cooked oatmeal, raw lentils vs cooked dal.
• Divide by the servings you really serve. If the pot feeds three people with seconds, use three.
• For a single food, the food calorie calculator is quicker; to plan a whole day, use the diet chart maker.