How to count calories in homemade food

By the C for Calories team · Updated October 12, 2026

Home cooking is healthy and also hard to log. Here's how to do it without weighing every ingredient every time.

For a single plate: take a photo

For a normal home-cooked meal, a photo gets you an itemised estimate. Check portions, and add the oil or butter you cooked with.

For batch cooking: log once, reuse

1. Add up the ingredients of the whole pot: the big items and the oil.
2. Divide by the number of portions.
3. Log one portion with Quick Add and save it as a favorite.
4. Log it again with one tap every time you eat it.

Raw vs cooked weights

Rice, pasta and meat change weight when cooked: rice roughly triples, pasta more than doubles, and meat loses around a quarter. Make sure the weight you log matches the type of entry, raw or cooked. Our rice and pasta pages use cooked values.

Oils and fats

Fat is the most calorie-dense ingredient and the easiest to forget. One tablespoon of olive oil is about 120 kcal; of butter, about 100 kcal.