Nutrition methodology
Where the numbers come from.
Every dish on Delicious carries calories, protein, carbs and fat. This page explains exactly how those figures are produced, what they are measured against, what is an estimate, and what we do not claim. If you are going to cook from a number, you deserve to know where it came from.
Ingredient-level, not guessed
Each recipe's ingredient lines are parsed individually and matched against a nutrition database (Spoonacular, which resolves to USDA-derived values). Amounts are summed across the whole recipe, then divided by the stated yield.
4,258 of 4,390 recipes (97%) currently carry database-derived macros. The remainder are model estimates awaiting a database pass, and are corrected as that pass reaches them.
Every figure is per serving
Calories, protein, carbs and fat are always per serving — never per pan, per batch or per recipe. The yield is printed on every recipe (4,390 of 4,390 state one), and the serving slider on a recipe page rescales the ingredients and the macros together.
Measured vs. estimated
Database-derived: calories, protein, carbs, fat.
Estimated on request: fibre, sugar, sodium, saturated / mono / poly / trans fat, cholesterol, potassium, calcium, iron, magnesium and key vitamins. Open Full nutrition on any recipe and it is computed from the ingredient list and labelled ≈ estimated. We do not present an estimate as a measurement.
The guard
What we do to catch bad numbers.
Generated nutrition fails in specific, repeatable ways, so the checks are specific too. Nothing publishes until it passes them — and a figure is never quietly rewritten to look better: a number that is correct but high stays as it is.
- Macro arithmetic must agree. Stated calories are checked against protein×4 + carbs×4 + fat×9. A dish whose calories contradict the macros printed beside them is rejected and recalculated.
- Frying oil is not food. A litre of oil in a fry bath is discarded, not eaten. Counting the bath as consumed is what produced a 6,915-calorie appetizer before this rule existed; roughly 10% absorption by food weight is counted now, while oil that stays in the dish still counts in full.
- Implausible servings are re-derived. Any single serving over 1,500 calories goes back for recalculation rather than publishing.
- A rich dish is allowed to be rich. When a dish is genuinely 800 calories, it says 800. Clamping honest figures down to a flattering ceiling is a lie, not a fix.
What we do not claim
No registered dietitian currently reviews the daily menus. We describe the food as balanced in the ordinary sense — protein, produce, whole ingredients, real portions — and not as a clinical or therapeutic diet.
Nothing here is medical or nutritional advice. If you are managing diabetes, kidney disease, pregnancy, an eating disorder or anything where intake matters clinically, treat these figures as a starting point and take the plan to your own clinician.
Dietary tags describe the recipe as written. We cannot see your kitchen, your brands or your cross-contact risk, so allergy safety is yours to verify against the actual packages you buy.
Published ranges
What a Delicious day actually totals.
A full day here is a complete day of eating — breakfast through dessert — so these are day totals for one person, not one meal. Real figures from the last 61 published days, not targets:
🥣 Easy
3,904 cal on a median day
range 2,044–5,801 cal across 61 days
About 169 g protein · 7 dishes a day
🍳 Intermediate
4,727 cal on a median day
range 3,001–6,357 cal across 61 days
About 182 g protein · 7 dishes a day
🍽️ Sophisticated
5,347 cal on a median day
range 3,622–7,211 cal across 61 days
About 201 g protein · 7 dishes a day
A published day is a menu, not a prescription. If your target is lower, the honest move is to cook fewer of the day's courses — the three main meals are laid out first for exactly that reason — or set a calorie target on a Premium plan and have the day built to it.
How recipes are made
Written by the Delicious Kitchen.
Recipes and journal articles are developed in-house with AI assistance and published under The Delicious Kitchen — never under a real chef's or writer's name, and never implying an endorsement that does not exist. They are not independently kitchen-tested by test-kitchen staff, and we say so rather than implying otherwise.
Found something wrong?
If a figure looks wrong, it may well be — tell us which recipe and what you think it should be. Corrections are applied to the recipe and, where the cause is systemic, to the rule that produced it. That is exactly how the frying-oil rule came to exist.
