Recipe Calorie Calculator

Where the numbers come from

Every ingredient in the picker carries its measured per-100-gram nutrition from the USDA's SR Legacy reference table, the stable federal food database behind decades of nutrition labels, along with USDA's own household weights (what a cup, a tablespoon, or one medium banana actually weighs). We convert each row to grams, multiply, add, and divide by your servings; every step of that arithmetic is shown under the answer. For the baking staples, the cup weights are the same spooned-and-leveled figures as our cups to grams page, so a cup of flour weighs 120 grams everywhere on this site.

A worked example: one loaf of banana bread

Every ingredient in the picker, per 100 grams

USDA values, sorted from most to fewest calories; click any column header to re-sort. This table is why butter-heavy recipes read the way they do: the top of the list is fats and nuts, and the bottom is vegetables that are mostly water.

Dry and cooked are different foods, on purpose

The picker lists white rice twice, and the two entries disagree by design: dry rice is 365 calories per 100 g and cooked rice is 130, a 2.8x gap that is nothing but absorbed water. The same split applies to pasta. Enter the ingredient the way you actually measured it: a recipe that starts with one cup of dry rice wants the DRY entry, a burrito bowl built from yesterday's rice wants COOKED. Picking the wrong one is the single biggest error a recipe calculator can make, which is why ours makes you choose instead of guessing.

The zero-calorie ingredient that dominates the label

Salt brings nothing to the calorie line and everything to the sodium line: one teaspoon is 6 grams and carries 2,325 mg of sodium, a hair over the FDA's entire 2,300 mg daily value. Baking soda is the stealth version at 1,259 mg per teaspoon, which is how a sweet quick bread ends up with more sodium per slice than a bag of chips. And vanilla extract's 288 calories per 100 g are mostly alcohol, which largely cooks off, and a teaspoon is 4 grams anyway: the label math worries about it, your loaf does not need to.

What the 4/4/9 rule can and cannot check

The familiar shortcut prices protein and carbs at 4 calories a gram and fat at 9, and every result here shows that arithmetic beside the USDA total as a cross-check. They rarely agree exactly, and the gap is honest: fiber is counted inside carbohydrate but ferments to roughly half the energy, and a few foods (cocoa most of all) get USDA-specific factors. Our test suite holds every ingredient in the picker to that identity within tolerance before the page can ship, with exactly two documented exceptions: vanilla, whose calories are alcohol at 7 per gram, and baking powder, whose "carbohydrate" is mostly carbonate, not food.

What this page deliberately does not do

It does not subtract what stays in the pan: drained bacon fat, skimmed stock, the marinade that gets tossed all mean a real plate runs a little UNDER these numbers, and overstating is the safe direction for anyone counting. It shows total sugars, not added sugars: the FDA daily value covers added sugar only, and a database of whole ingredients cannot tell a banana's sugar from the spoonful next to it, so we leave that % blank rather than fake it. And it prices ingredients, not brands: your yogurt and the USDA's reference yogurt will differ by a little, which is why the answer says "about". Scaling the batch up or down is the recipe scaler's job; what to do with the calorie number belongs to the calorie calculator and TDEE calculator.