Recipe nutrition calculator

The nutrition of every counted line is the USDA FoodData Central record for that food, per 100 g, scaled to the line's weight. Nothing in the answer is a figure the AI made up: it is never asked for one, and the answer it gives has no place to put one. What the AI does is read your text, and reading can go wrong, so the table shows what it read for every line: the amount, the unit, the food it matched and the weight that came to.

Weights are exact when you give them. Cups and spoons go through USDA's own cup and spoon weights for that food, which assume it is measured the way USDA measured it: a packed cup of brown sugar and a loose one are not the same. A count with no size, such as 2 onions, uses USDA's medium portion, and eggs USDA's large one, as recipes mean; each line says which portion it used. Meat and fish are never counted by the piece: a chicken breast or a salmon fillet can weigh twice as much as another, so give their weight. A can is the exception, because it is sold by weight.

A line is not counted when the food is not in our USDA data yet, when we only have it in another state (cooked rice when the recipe uses dry rice), or when USDA gives no weight for the unit (a handful, a bunch for most foods). Those lines are left out of the totals and marked, so a recipe with lines left out has more calories than the total shows. For where AI food tools go right and wrong in general, read how accurate AI calorie counting is.

1. You paste the ingredients, add the servings if you know them, and tick the box. The text goes to Google Gemini to be read. We do not store it, and nothing you paste is published.
2. The AI turns each ingredient line into a food name, an amount and a unit, plus the words that pick a portion: a size, raw or cooked, chopped or sliced. That is all it is asked for.
3. Our code converts the amount to grams. Grams, kilograms, ounces and pounds convert exactly; cups, spoons, millilitres and pieces use the food's USDA portion weights, the same ones our cups to grams converters use.
4. Each food is looked up in our USDA-based food database by its whole name, and only in the state the line is measured in: a recipe's raw chicken never gets the roasted chicken's numbers.
5. The counted lines are added up, divided by the servings, and scaled to 100 g. The table always sums to the totals above it.

Per serving is the recipe's total divided by the number of servings: the number you type, or else the one the recipe states (serves 4). Without either, the answer shows the whole recipe and per 100 g only.

Per 100 g is per 100 g of the counted ingredients as you weigh them, before cooking. Cooking changes the weight much more than the calories: simmering and baking drive off water, so a cooked dish usually weighs less than its raw ingredients, and its calories per 100 g are higher. To get the figure for the finished dish, weigh it once it is cooked and divide the recipe's total calories by that weight, then multiply by 100.

• Put one ingredient on each line, with its amount first, as most recipes already do.
• Give grams where you have them, from the packet or the scale. A weight needs no conversion at all.
• Say dry or cooked for rice, pasta, grains and lentils, and raw or cooked for meat. Their calories per gram change a lot when they cook, so a line that does not say is not counted rather than guessed.
• Weigh meat and fish: 500 g chicken breast, not 2 chicken breasts.
• Change the servings after an answer as often as you like: the figures per serving are worked out again on the page, without another of the day's free runs.
• Give a size for anything counted: 1 large onion, 3 medium carrots.
• Keep the oil, butter and sugar lines in. They are small amounts with a lot of the recipe's energy in them.
• Paste the ingredients rather than the whole method. Only ingredient lines are read: up to 30 of them and 2,000 characters in all. A longer recipe is read up to its 30th ingredient, and the answer says the rest were left out.