Cooking Quantity Calculator

How much to buy, after shrinkage tells the truth

Choose the food, the guest count, the appetite at the table and whether you want leftovers, and this calculator works the catering sum the right way round: how much cooked food must land on plates, divided by the food’s cooking yield, equals how much raw food to buy. Meats shrink (a quarter to nearly half of the raw weight never reaches a plate, as water, fat and bone); rice and pasta swell to two or three times their dry weight. Presets carry standard serving sizes and yields, and every figure can be overridden for your own cut and your own crowd.

For dry goods this is the cooked weight on the plate; the yield below converts back to dry.
Under 100 for meats (shrinkage), well over 100 for rice and pasta (they absorb water).

Disclaimer: This calculator gives estimates for general information only. It is not financial, medical or other professional advice. Quantities plan the shopping; doneness is always a thermometer’s decision, never a quantity’s.

What this calculator does

Underbuying and overbuying both come from the same skipped step: forgetting that raw weight and served weight are different numbers. A kilo of boneless chicken delivers roughly 750 g cooked; a kilo of bone-in chops can deliver barely half as edible meat; a kilo of dry rice delivers about 2.6 kilos cooked. Caterers hold those yields in their heads and divide, never guess. This tool does their division in the open: edible target divided by yield, with appetite and leftover intent multiplied in honestly at the top rather than smuggled into a rounded-up guess at the shop.

How to use it

  • Plan dish by dish. Run the main, then each side on its own preset or a custom yield. A table’s appetite is shared across dishes, so a main plus three generous sides wants lighter settings on each than a main standing alone.
  • Read the yield before trusting the preset. Yield is where cuts differ: a lean steak and a fatty shoulder at the same raw weight plate very differently. Your butcher’s cut, heavily trimmed or not, is the yield you should type.
  • Use the buffer for risk, not for hunger. Appetite describes the crowd; the buffer describes your tolerance for running out. Cooking for a wedding argues for the buffer; a Tuesday family dinner does not.
  • Round up at the shop, not in the maths. Buy the next packet or the slightly larger joint above the printed raw figure; rounding inside the calculation compounds silently across dishes.

The method

  • Cooked target = guests × serving per guest × appetite × (1 + leftovers buffer).
  • Raw to buy = cooked target / (yield / 100). Yields below 100 shrink the purchase upward; yields above 100 (dry goods) shrink it downward.
  • Preset yields are standard catering references: boneless chicken about 75 percent, ground beef about 70, sliced beef roast about 70, bone-in pork chops about 55 (bone plus cooking loss), salmon about 82, dry rice about 260 cooked, dry pasta about 225 cooked.
  • No time estimates live here. Quantities and times are different crafts; the cooking time calculator handles times from charts, and temperature decides doneness there as here.

Worked examples

Chicken for twenty. 20 guests, 150 g cooked each, standard appetite, a 10 percent buffer for insurance: the cooked target is 20 × 150 × 1.1 = 3,300 g. At a 75 percent yield the raw purchase is 3,300 / 0.75 = 4,400 g, 4.40 kg of boneless chicken breast. The cook who bought 3.3 kg raw (a kilo of it destined to leave as steam and pan juices) plates about 2,475 g: the classic shortfall this page exists to prevent.

Rice runs the other way. 10 guests at 200 g of cooked rice each need 2,000 g cooked; at a 260 percent yield that is 2,000 / 2.6 = 769.23 g dry: call it a 800 g bag with margin, not the 2 kilos a symmetric guess would buy and a small pot would drown in.

Reading your results

Read the raw figure as a floor for the shop, and the per-guest raw figure as the sense-check: if a guest’s raw chicken reads near a whole bird, a field is wrong, not the crowd’s appetite. Read the yield you ended with as the decision to revisit next time: weigh a cooked batch once, compare it with what you bought, and your household’s true yield for that cut replaces the preset forever. That one act of weighing calibrates this tool better than any database.

Limitations

  • Yields vary by cut, method and cook. Grilling loses more than poaching; a well-done roast yields less than a rare one; brisket famously surrenders up to half. Presets are mid-range catering values, not your joint’s biography.
  • Appetite is a blunt instrument. Children, teenagers, athletes, alcohol, event length and weather all bend real consumption in ways a three-position switch approximates honestly but roughly.
  • Bone-in and whole items round to whole animals and joints. The maths may call for 1.4 chickens; shops sell 2. The printed weight is the target for the butcher’s counter, where whole-item rounding is a conversation, not a calculation.
  • Sides share the stomach. Summing full-appetite servings across many dishes overestimates; the appetite setting is the intended counterweight, and restraint there is realism, not stinginess.

Frequently asked questions

How much meat per person is standard?

Catering references cluster around 150 to 200 g of cooked edible meat per adult for a main with sides, more when the meat is the event and sides are light. In raw terms that is roughly 200 to 280 g of boneless meat, or 300 to 400 g bone-in, which is exactly the spread the yield column produces from the cooked figure. The preset servings sit in that band; appetite and the buffer walk them up or down deliberately.

Why is the rice figure so small compared with the meat?

Because dry rice and pasta absorb two to three times their weight in water as they cook, while meat only loses. The yield for rice (about 260 percent) is the mirror image of the meat yields (55 to 82 percent), and a calculator that ignored the direction of that difference would overbuy rice by kilos and underbuy meat by the amount that matters. It is the single clearest case for doing quantity by yield rather than by feel.

How do I find my own yield for a cut?

Weigh the raw purchase, cook it as you normally do, weigh what is served (after bones and inedible trim are removed, before sauces dress it up). Cooked divided by raw, times 100, is your yield for that cut, that method and that doneness. Enter it here once and the presets stop being averages and start being your kitchen’s records.

Should I add a buffer for a big event?

For a one-shot event with no second shop run (a wedding, a holiday, guests who travelled), yes: the 10 to 20 percent buffer prices the asymmetry honestly, because running out is remembered and leftovers are lunch. For repeatable family cooking, the buffer mostly buys waste, and appetite set correctly does the work instead. The tool separates the two so the choice is visible rather than baked into a mysteriously large number.

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Method: cooked target from guests, serving size, appetite and leftover buffer, divided by cooking yield to give the raw purchase weight; preset yields from standard catering references, all overridable. Last reviewed: 15 October 2026.