Calories in Indian Food: A Chart of 100+ Dishes per Typical Serving

Where these calorie numbers come from

Indian dishes have no single calorie count, because two cooks never use the same oil, ghee or portion. So every figure on this page comes from a published database, with the serving weight it applies to:

• Indian Nutrient Databank (INDB, 2024): a peer-reviewed, open database that calculates 1,014 standard Indian recipes from India's food composition tables (IFCT 2017). Most recipes come from two Indian cookery textbooks. Marked INDB.
• USDA FoodData Central: the US survey database (FNDDS) includes Indian dishes such as dal, idli, dosa, samosa and biryani with set portion weights. Marked USDA.
• UK composition of foods (CoFID 2021): the UK's official dataset includes many South Asian dishes, both homemade and from takeaways. Marked UK.
• IFCT 2017: India's own tables from ICMR-NIN, used here for milk, fruit and raw ingredients. Marked IFCT.

Serving weights are the cooked weight given by each database. INDB's bowls are often generous, so if your katori is smaller, scale down. Where sources disagree a lot, we show a range. We left out dishes we could not source reliably: for deep-fried items such as bhatura, kachori and jalebi, the calculated recipe data counts all the frying oil rather than what the food absorbs, so the numbers are not usable.

Calories in rotis, parathas and other Indian breads

Calories in rice, biryani and pulao

Chicken biryani shows how much recipes differ: USDA's version has 104 kcal per 100 g and the UK takeaway version 163 kcal per 100 g, mainly because of the fat.

Calories in dal, rajma, chole and sambar

Calories in paneer dishes and vegetable sabzi

Calories in butter chicken and other non-veg dishes

Calories in butter chicken: INDB's home recipe (125 g of raw chicken breast per serving, with ghee, cream and tomato) gives 377 kcal for a 275 g serving. Creamy restaurant versions can run higher: UK food composition data for retail chicken tikka masala, a similar dish, give 156 kcal per 100 g, or about 468 kcal for 300 g. The recipe's 1.5 tablespoons of ghee, split over two servings, account for roughly 90 to 100 kcal of each serving.

Calories in idli, dosa and Indian breakfast items

Want breakfasts with more protein for the calories? See our high-protein Indian breakfast list, and for South Indian meals the South Indian diet plan for weight loss.

Calories in samosa, pakora and Indian snacks

Calories in Indian sweets

Calories in chai, lassi and other drinks

Calories in common Indian fruits

How oil and ghee change the calories in Indian food

Fat is the biggest reason the same dish can differ by 100 kcal or more from one kitchen to the next. Oil and ghee are almost pure fat, at about 9 kcal per gram. A teaspoon of oil (5 g) adds about 45 kcal, and USDA lists a tablespoon of ghee (14 g) at about 123 kcal. ICMR-NIN's 2024 Dietary Guidelines for Indians, as summarised in the Indian Journal of Medical Research, suggest about 25 to 30 g of fats and oils a day, roughly 5 to 6 teaspoons, for the whole day's cooking.

• Measure the tadka. Pour oil from a teaspoon, not straight from the bottle. Two teaspoons instead of two tablespoons in a family dal saves roughly 150 kcal across the pot.
• Choose dry cooking for meat and paneer. Tandoori chicken (145 kcal per 100 g, INDB) and paneer tikka give the protein without a cream gravy.
• Treat cream, butter and cashew paste as extras. They are what make shahi paneer (406 kcal a bowl) heavier than palak paneer (230 kcal).
• Fried once a week, not daily. Puri, pakora and samosa are 135 to 310 kcal per piece or small serving.

How to estimate the calories in a thali

1. 1

   Count each item separately

   List every bowl and bread on the plate. A thali is usually 5 to 8 items, and each one has a value in the tables above.

2. 2

   Match your katori to the serving weight

   INDB's dal bowl is 277 g. If your katori holds about half that, halve the calories. A kitchen scale for one week makes your estimates far better.

3. 3

   Add the visible fat

   Ghee on rotis or rice, butter on naan and a fried papad all add up. Count 45 kcal per teaspoon of oil and about 41 per teaspoon of ghee.

4. 4

   Add the sweet and the drink

   A gulab jamun (136 to 153 kcal for 50 g) or a sweet lassi (162 kcal) can add 15 to 20% to a thali.

To know what those numbers mean for you, find your maintenance calories with our TDEE calculator, then set a weight-loss target with the calorie deficit calculator. On a 1,800 kcal target, the restaurant thali alone uses about 70% of the day. Our fat loss page explains how to pair a deficit with training.

Calories are half the story: watch protein too

Two meals with the same calories can do very different jobs. A bowl of palak paneer (230 kcal) gives about 11.9 g of protein, while a bowl of aloo methi (276 kcal) gives about 4.6 g (INDB). When you cut calories, keep protein high to protect muscle: use our protein in Indian food chart, the high-protein vegetarian Indian diet and the protein intake calculator. If you want to build muscle instead, see muscle building.

Regional plans apply these numbers to local food: Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Kerala and Maharashtrian.