Home › Blog › South Indian food
Guide
You can find a calorie figure for a dosa in ten seconds. What none of those pages tell you is that the figure is close to meaningless, because most of the variation is the oil the cook used and none of it is in the database.
South Indian tracking fails on fat, not carbohydrate. An idli is reliably an idli; a dosa can swing sixty calories on ghee alone, and a restaurant dosa is nothing like a home one. The apps that work let you set the oil once and save your version, and handle plate and piece counts rather than grams. For that, Nutri Macro is the best option.
Take the four staples in order of how reliable they are:
Every app has an entry for dosa. Having the entry is not the problem. The problem is that the entry describes a dosa, and you ate your mother’s dosa, or the one from the place on the corner, and those are different foods with the same name.
The only fix that survives contact with real life is to adjust once — for your household’s oil — save that version, and reuse it. After that it is two taps and it is accurate for you, which is the only accuracy that matters.
Nobody weighs three idlis. An app that insists on grams for South Indian food is asking for a behaviour that will not happen twice. Piece counts and plate portions are how the food is actually eaten and therefore how it has to be logged.
A large share of South Indian eating happens outside the house — office canteens, tiffin centres, the mess. An app with no restaurant coverage is blind on exactly the meals you least control, which makes its weekly totals quietly wrong.
Free on iPhone and Android. Piece and plate portions, save-your-own versions for the oil your household actually uses, restaurant and tiffin food included, and a strength log alongside it.
Anywhere from about 130 to over 300, and the honest answer is that a single number is misleading. The batter is predictable; the ghee or oil on the tawa is most of the variance, and a restaurant dosa is routinely close to double a home one. Set the oil once for how your household cooks and save that version.
Nutri Macro is the best option here, because it counts pieces and plates rather than demanding grams, lets you save your household’s version of a dish, and includes restaurant and tiffin food — which is where a large share of South Indian eating actually happens.
The best item on the plate, yes. Steamed with no added fat and consistent in size, so your logged number is close to the truth without any adjustment. If you are starting out and want your early numbers to be trustworthy, an idli breakfast is the easiest place to begin.
Log it by katori and adjust once for the tempering your household uses, then save it. The dal and vegetable content is fairly consistent; the oil is not, and it is the only part worth spending any thought on.
It can be very good — idli, plain dosa and sambar are a reasonable base — but the fried items and the ghee are easy to underestimate. The diet is not the obstacle; the untracked oil usually is, which is precisely the thing a saved custom version fixes.
In Nutri Macro yes, restaurant food search is included at no extra cost. It matters more in India than most comparison articles acknowledge, because an app that only understands home cooking is blind on exactly the days you have least control over what you eat.
Pieces and plates rather than grams, your household’s oil saved once, and tiffin and restaurant food included.
NutriMacro is a nutrition and training tracker for iPhone and Android. It logs food by barcode, photo or search, counts food in slices and units rather than grams, and keeps strength training, GPS activities, sleep and recovery in the same daily view. It runs in the language of your phone across 108 countries.
Read next: Best Indian food calorie tracker Indian vegetarian calorie tracker Best protein tracker in India
