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Cooking Oil Calories: Should You Count Them?

6 min read
Light catching a little cooking oil in a dark frying pan on a stove.
Photo by Piermario Eva on Unsplash.

Yes, count cooking oil. A tablespoon is about 120 calories and 13.5g of fat, according to the USDA’s FoodData Central. If you track macros, log it as fat. Not all the oil you pour ends up in your food. If it stays in a sauce, count all of it. If some is left in the pan, count only what’s gone.

In brief

  • Sauces, stews and dressings keep all their oil. Pan frying and roasting leave some behind.
  • In a small 2018 test kitchen study from Brazil, pan-fried meat and fish took in about half of the tablespoon of oil they were cooked in.
  • Some US oil sprays say "0 calories" because US labelling rules let a serving under 5 calories be shown as zero.
  • A rough estimate, like "about a tablespoon", is close enough for most people.

How many calories are in cooking oil?

About 120 a tablespoon. Oil is almost pure fat, and fat has 9 calories a gram, against 4 for carbs or protein. Olive oil and rapeseed oil come out the same.

Food Calories Fat
1 teaspoon of olive or rapeseed oil 40 4.5g
1 tablespoon of olive or rapeseed oil 120 13.5g
2 tablespoons of olive or rapeseed oil 240 27g
1 tablespoon of butter 100 11.5g

Figures from US government food data (see Sources).

Say you make a bolognese for four and start it with two tablespoons of oil. That’s about 240 calories in the pot, or 60 on each plate. Now say you cook for one. You roast some vegetables in two tablespoons, the tray comes out dry, and you dress a salad with one more. That’s about 360 calories in a day, which a log can easily miss.

Does food soak up all the oil in the pan?

Usually not. Cooking doesn’t make the calories disappear, though. The oil either goes into your food or stays behind in the pan.

A small 2018 study from Brazil measured how much. Cooks in a test kitchen fried nine everyday recipes in four different oils, weighing the oil before and after.

Each pan-fried portion of meat or fish was cooked in about a tablespoon of oil. It took in about half of it. That worked out at about 7g of oil in every 100g of cooked food, or roughly 65 calories.

Deep-fried food took in more, nearly 19g of oil per 100g on average. French toast took in the most of anything, about 43g per 100g. Draining food on kitchen paper took a little off, but not much.

Your kitchen won’t match a test kitchen. The study only tested a few foods, and it didn’t use olive oil. It gives you a rough idea, not an exact figure.

How much of the oil should you count?

Count the oil that ends up in what you eat. The way you cook tells you roughly how much that is.

  1. Sauces, curries, stews and stir fries: the oil stays in the dish, so count all of it, split across the portions.
  2. Roast vegetables and potatoes: count all of it if the tray comes out dry. If oil is pooled on the tray, a rough guess of half is fine.
  3. Dressings and drizzles: count all of it.
  4. Pan frying with oil left over: count about half, in line with the study above. Or, once the pan has cooled, tip what’s left into a spoon and take that off.
  5. Deep frying: this is hard to measure at home. Log it as the fried food, like “fried chicken” or “chips”, rather than the food plus the oil.

Butter follows the same rules as oil.

Do oil sprays really have zero calories?

A spray is still oil, just very little of it. Some sprays say “0 calories” because US labels can round anything under 5 calories a serving down to zero.

So a quick spray is close to nothing, but ten of them aren’t. Count your sprays. If the label gives calories per spray, use that.

Does this matter if you’re trying to gain weight?

Yes. If you’re adding oil and not counting it, your log says you ate less than you did. You might then add even more food, and gain faster than you meant to.

The NHS suggests adults who need to gain weight try adding around 300 to 500 extra calories a day. The NHS doesn’t single out oil. But for a sense of scale, two tablespoons is about 240 calories.

The NHS also says to speak to a GP if you’ve lost weight suddenly, or without changing your diet or exercise.

Can a photo calorie app see the oil?

Not reliably. A camera can see the chicken and the rice. It can’t see whether the pan had one spoon of oil or three.

Photo logging is still quick and useful. You just need to tell it what the camera can’t see. Add a short note, like “a glug of oil in the pan” or “roasted in two tablespoons of oil”. Say how you cooked it, too, so the app knows whether the oil stayed in the dish. We look at what helps photo apps most in how accurate are AI photo calorie counters.

What should you do this week?

Once you know the rules, three habits make them stick. You don’t need to measure forever.

  1. Measure your usual pour: pour oil the way you normally would, then tip it into a tablespoon. Do this for a week or so, until you know what your normal “splash” is. We suggest the same with other hard-to-judge foods in do you need to weigh food to count calories.
  2. Log the oil with the meal, so it doesn’t get forgotten.
  3. Check your weight against your log: if it isn’t moving the way your log says after a few weeks, oil and other extras are good places to look first. We explain other reasons in why do I always underestimate how much I’ve eaten.

If measuring starts to feel like too much, logging “about a tablespoon” is close enough. And if tracking starts to feel stressful, it’s fine to step back. We wrote about that in is calorie counting bad for your anxiety.

Where Ori fits

In Ori, anyone can open a logged meal, tap Edit ingredients, and add the oil. With Premium, you can snap a photo or type a sentence, then mention the oil and Ori counts it. Ori also watches how your weight changes over the weeks and adjusts your guidance, so a missed splash here and there matters less. If that sounds easier, you can try Ori here.

Sources

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Ori supports general wellness. It is not medical care. If you have a history of disordered eating, are pregnant or breastfeeding, take medicines that affect weight or appetite, or have a clinical nutrition need, speak with a qualified healthcare professional before changing your intake or weight goal.

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