Simple steps for everyday cooking

How to calculate calories and macros for a homemade dish

For homemade soup, a casserole or meatballs, it helps to estimate the whole recipe first and then your serving. Nutrition per 100 g of one ingredient is not nutrition per 100 g of the finished dish.

Gather the figures for the whole recipe

Record each ingredient’s edible weight and the matching figures from its label or a reference database. If you weighed a grain dry, choose a dry-grain entry; if you weighed it cooked, use a cooked entry.

  1. For each ingredient: value per 100 g × ingredient weight ÷ 100.
  2. Add up calories, protein, fat and carbohydrate separately.
  3. Include oil, cream and other additions. If some oil or cooking liquid is left behind and not eaten, using everything added will give an approximation.

Weigh the finished food without its container

Water can be absorbed or evaporate during cooking. This changes the dish’s weight, although water itself adds no calories. Use the actual finished weight to calculate a serving.

Serving value = whole-dish value × serving weight ÷ cooked-dish weight. This assumes the ingredients are reasonably evenly distributed; calculate separate pieces of meat and side dishes separately.

A worked example

Suppose the ingredients total 1,200 kcal and 80 g of protein, and the finished dish weighs 800 g. A 200 g serving is one quarter: about 300 kcal and 20 g of protein. Divide fat and carbohydrate in the same proportion.

These are illustrative numbers, not the nutrition of a particular recipe. Weigh unequal portions individually; dividing by the number of servings only works for equal portions.

Try it in practice