Katori, cup, bowl and plate: what a portion means in grams

Home food is served in katoris, bowls, cups and spoonfuls, not in grams. That is fine, as long as everyone agrees what a katori is. A small steel katori holds about 150 ml. A rice bowl can hold twice that. A dinner plate of biryani can be anything.

The portions this site uses

Every dish page states its portion in words and in grams, so you can see what was assumed. The table below lists them. A katori of a runny dal and a katori of a dry sabzi weigh different amounts, because a dry sabzi sits loosely in the bowl: this site takes a katori of dal tadka as 150 g and a katori of bhindi masala as 110 g.

Check your own once

1. Fill your usual katori or bowl with water and pour it into a measuring jug. That is its volume in ml.
2. Weigh one serving of a dish you eat often, such as dal or rice.
3. In Homekcal, set your katori size once. Every later photo that uses a katori starts from your size.

Count instead of guessing

Some foods are easier to count than to measure: roti, paratha, idli, dosa, tortillas, eggs and dumplings. Homekcal gives these a counter, so two roti are two roti, not "1 serving bread".

Rice: weigh it raw if you can

Rice gains a lot of weight as it cooks: in this site's recipe the cooked pot weighs about 2.8 times the raw rice. If you cook rice for the family, weigh the raw rice once, weigh the cooked pot, and you know what your katori holds. Plain rice on this site assumes about 43 g of raw rice per 120 g katori of cooked rice.