I love to cook and experiment with recipes. While I'm aware that calories are not a perfect measure of what makes you gain weight and what doesn't, I would still love to have a rough idea of the energy values of the dishes I'm preparing, and ideally be able to fiddle with the ingredients just to see what happens to the calorie count.
How would I best approach this?
My vision is that of a tool that
lets you enter a recipe's ingredients and amounts, and can calculate an approximate calorie count for the most common ingredients
ideally, lets you add other ingredients and their energy values?
I know for a fact there is software like this, but all the good products I've seen are for professional diet advisors, nutritional consultants and the like, and tend to be very expensive.
I guess the basic functionality could be achieved with an Excel sheet, but where to get high-quality nutritional data from? Are there industry-standard databases for this?
This question matches mine in the title, but seems to be more about the calorie differences between cooked and raw food, which is not my concern.