Recipe Nutrition Calculator
Calories and nutrients of a whole recipe per serving and per 100 g, from USDA data.
Recipe
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Nutrition
Share of energy
| Nutrient | Per serving | % DV | Per 100 g | Whole recipe |
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For general information only, not medical advice. Consult a qualified health professional for advice about your situation.
About the Recipe Nutrition Calculator
Work out the nutrition of a home or small-batch recipe. Find each ingredient in USDA FoodData Central — more than 13,000 foods — and enter how much you use in grams, cups, spoons or pieces. The calculator adds everything up and shows calories, protein, carbohydrate, fat, fibre, sodium, vitamins and minerals for the whole recipe, per serving and per 100 g, with the share of energy from each macronutrient and the % Daily Value.
For ingredients that are cooked, choose how: the USDA Table of Nutrient Retention Factors then takes off the vitamins and minerals lost in cooking — boiling dal for an hour keeps about half its folate. Weigh the finished dish to get values per 100 g of what you actually eat. Everything is worked out in your browser, and the results can go straight to the nutrition label generator.
How to use it
- Type an ingredient (for example “lentils raw”, “onion”, “olive oil”) and choose the best match. Prefer raw ingredients; FNDDS foods are as eaten.
- Enter the amount and pick the unit: grams, kilograms, ounces, the food’s own measures (cup, tablespoon, a medium onion) or ml when USDA gives a volume measure.
- For raw ingredients that are cooked, choose the cooking method so vitamin and mineral losses are taken off. Leave it at “No adjustment” for foods already listed as cooked.
- Enter the number of servings and, if you can, the weight of the cooked dish without the pan.
- Read the values per serving and per 100 g. Copy them, download a CSV, or press Make a nutrition label to open the label generator with these values.
Examples
Per serving: 210 kcal · protein 12.1 g · carbohydrate 33.0 g (fibre 5.6 g) · fat 3.9 g · sodium 586 mg (25% DV) · iron 2.7 mg (15%) · folate 119 µg (30%) · per 100 g of dal: 93 kcal
Folate 235 µg a serving instead of 119 µg — USDA’s factor for legumes boiled 45–75 minutes keeps 50% of folate, 65% of thiamin and 85% of iron
Protein 22% · carbohydrate 61% · fat 16% (4, 4 and 9 kcal per gram)
How the recipe is worked out
Each ingredient’s nutrients per 100 g in FoodData Central are multiplied by the grams you use, adjusted for cooking (below), and added up. Per serving is the total divided by the number of servings. Per 100 g is the total divided by the weight of the cooked dish when you enter it — cooking drives off or adds water, so 100 g of cooked dal holds far less than 100 g of raw lentils — or by the weight of the raw ingredients when you do not.
Cups and spoons are the US measures FoodData Central uses (1 cup = 236.6 ml, 1 tbsp = 14.8 ml, 1 tsp = 4.9 ml). When a food has a plain “1 cup” or “1 tbsp” measure, the calculator also offers ml and the other spoon sizes, worked out from it. If your cup is 250 ml, enter ml instead.
The share of energy uses 4 kcal per gram of protein and carbohydrate (fibre included), 9 for fat and 7 for alcohol. % Daily Value uses the US FDA Daily Values for adults and children 4 years and over.
Cooking losses: USDA retention factors
The USDA Table of Nutrient Retention Factors (Release 6, 2007) gives, for about 270 kinds of food and ways of cooking them, the percentage of each nutrient that is still there after cooking. It covers calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, zinc, copper, vitamin A, vitamin C, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin B6, folate, vitamin B12, choline and alcohol. Water-soluble vitamins suffer most: legumes boiled 45–75 minutes keep 50% of folate and 70% of vitamin C, and pasta boiled and drained keeps 30% of its potassium and 50% of its sodium.
Energy, protein, fat and carbohydrate are counted as fully kept. Fat that drips out of meat is not taken off, so for meat cooked without its drippings the fat can be overstated. Apply a factor only to raw ingredients that you cook; FoodData Central already lists many cooked foods (“rice, cooked”), which must be left unadjusted.
Getting reliable numbers
- Weigh ingredients when you can: how a cup or spoon is filled — packed, heaped or levelled — changes the weight.
- Use the ingredient as you buy it — raw lentils, raw rice, uncooked pasta — and say how it is cooked, rather than mixing raw and cooked forms.
- FoodData Central foods are averages, and not every food has every nutrient. A total marked “at least” means some ingredients have no value for that nutrient.
- Water, tea and spices add little; leave them out unless you use a lot, but do include oil, ghee, sugar and salt.
Sources
- USDA Agricultural Research Service, FoodData Central (public domain, CC0 1.0): Foundation Foods (April 2026), SR Legacy (April 2018) and FNDDS 2021–2023 (October 2024), as used by the nutrition facts lookup
- USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory, Table of Nutrient Retention Factors, Release 6, data file
- USDA Agriculture Handbook No. 102, Food Yields Summarized by Different Stages of Preparation: cooking yields are not estimated from it — weigh the cooked dish instead
- US eCFR, 21 CFR 101.9: Daily Values used for % DV
Limitations
- Values are estimates from average food composition, not a laboratory analysis of your dish. For a product label, use analysis or have the calculation checked.
- Cooking yields (water lost or gained) are not estimated: enter the cooked weight, or per 100 g is of the raw ingredients.
- Retention factors are for broad food groups and methods; vitamins D, E and K, and energy, protein, fat and carbohydrate, are not adjusted.
- Added sugars are not in FoodData Central’s data, so they are not shown; enter them in the label generator from the sugar and other sweeteners in the recipe.
- Indian dishes often need their raw ingredients entered one by one (atta, dal, ghee, vegetables, spices); FNDDS has some cooked dishes as eaten in the US.
Privacy
Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate the calories in a recipe?
Add up the calories of each ingredient for the amount used (calories per 100 g × grams ÷ 100), then divide by the number of servings. For calories per 100 g of the cooked dish, divide the total by the weight of the dish and multiply by 100. This calculator does that with USDA data.
Does cooking change the calories?
Cooking changes the weight (water is lost or absorbed) much more than the calories, so the calories of the whole pot stay about the same while the calories per 100 g change. Some vitamins and minerals are lost — USDA’s retention factors estimate how much.
Should I enter rice and dal raw or cooked?
Raw, as you measure them, and choose the cooking method. Then weigh the cooked dish. Mixing a raw weight with the nutrition of cooked rice (or the other way round) can be wrong by a factor of two or three.
Why is a value marked “at least”?
At least one ingredient has no value for that nutrient in FoodData Central, so the total is a minimum. The list under the table names those ingredients.
Can I make a nutrition label from my recipe?
Yes. Press Make a nutrition label: the values per 100 g, the serving size and the number of servings open in the nutrition label generator, which formats them for the US FDA, India’s FSSAI or the EU. Add the added sugars there, and check the label before using it on a pack.