Counting calories in food you cook at home

Food databases are good at packaged and restaurant food and weak at the dal your family makes every Tuesday. The fix is to count your own recipe once and reuse it.

The pot to portion method

1. Write down what goes in the pot, by weight if you can: dry lentils or beans, vegetables, meat, oil or ghee, cream, nuts, sugar. Spices and water add almost nothing and can be skipped.
2. Add up the pot. Each ingredient's calories and protein, using the packet or a database such as USDA FoodData Central.
3. Weigh the cooked pot (weigh the empty pot first and subtract it).
4. Divide. Calories in the pot ÷ cooked weight = calories per gram. A 150 g katori is 150 × that.

Do it once for each dish you cook often, and the work is done.

Why the cooked weight matters

Cooking adds or removes water. Dal and rice take on water; a dry sabzi loses it. The same recipe can be thick one day and thin the next. Weighing the cooked pot is what turns a recipe into a number per katori that you can trust for that batch.

In Homekcal

Saved home recipes do this for you. Enter the recipe once, or photograph the pot and fix the ingredients, then tell it how much the pot made. Later photos of that dish use your recipe instead of a generic one, and the estimate says it is using your recipe. The free plan keeps one saved recipe; Pro keeps as many as you cook.

A shortcut when you cannot weigh

Use the dish pages on this site as a starting point. Each one lists the recipe it assumes, so you can see whether your version has more or less oil, cream or lentils, and adjust. For example, compare dal tadka, rajma or chicken curry with how you make them.