Recipe calorie calculator
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Home cooking has no label on the side. Add what actually went in the pan and divide it properly.
Weigh raw and dry, always
A hundred grams of dry pasta becomes roughly two hundred and fifty grams cooked. The calories did not multiply, water did. The same applies to rice, lentils and oats, and in reverse to meat, which loses water and gets denser as it cooks.
So the rule is simple. Weigh what you put in, in the state you bought it. Whatever comes out of the pan holds the same energy it went in with.
The oil is the part everyone forgets
A tablespoon of olive oil is around 120 calories, and a generous glug for a family pan is two or three of them. That single ingredient often carries more energy than the vegetables it is cooking. If you skip one entry in this calculator, do not let it be the fat.
Frying is the exception to the raw weight rule. Food genuinely absorbs oil, and how much depends on temperature and surface area. If you deep fry, add roughly ten percent of the food weight in oil and accept that this one is an estimate.
Servings are where the error hides
Dividing a dish by four assumes four equal plates, which is almost never what happens. If one person eats a third of the pan, their portion is not the number above.
For anything you cook regularly, weigh the finished dish once, then weigh your own plate. From then on you know your share as a percentage and the arithmetic stops lying to you.
Stop doing this by hand
Cook once, photograph the plate, and Kalixo does the dividing for you next time.
Get Kalixo free on the App StoreQuestions people actually ask
Do I count calories before or after cooking?
Before, using raw and dry weights. Cooking changes water content, not energy. The only exception is added fat that the food absorbs during frying.
How accurate is a recipe calculator?
Within about ten percent if you weigh the dense ingredients and estimate the vegetables. That is more accurate than any restaurant menu and far better than guessing.
What about a sauce that reduces?
Reduction removes water only. A sauce that halves in volume has the same calories in half the liquid, so it is twice as dense per spoon.
Should I count the marinade I throw away?
Count roughly a third of it. Some clings to the food and some goes down the sink, and no honest method gets closer than that.