How We Count

Where These Numbers Come From

Nobody types them. Every figure under every recipe on this site is calculated from the ingredient list — line by line, gram by gram — against a food composition table, and then divided by the number of servings. Change one ingredient and the panel changes with it, because the panel is not a note about the recipe. It is the recipe, added up.

That sounds obvious. It is not how most recipe sites work, and the difference shows up in one word.

The word that moves a number by a third

Look at a recipe that calls for 100 g of chicken breast. Is that raw chicken you are about to cook, or cooked chicken you are adding to a salad?

• raw: 120 calories, 22.5 g protein
• cooked: 165 calories, 31 g protein

Same bird, same 100 g, numbers a third apart — because cooking drives off water and concentrates what is left. A site that writes «chicken breast» and leaves it there is choosing one of those figures for you and not saying which.

Our ingredient lines say raw or cooked, every time, and the calculation uses the row that matches. It is a small word doing a lot of work.

What we count, and where we are deliberately pessimistic

We count exactly what the recipe lists, which means we sometimes count more than you will actually eat. Twice, on purpose:

• A drained tin is counted undrained. If a recipe calls for a tin of chickpeas or tuna, the figure includes the liquid you pour away. Draining and rinsing removes a good share of the sodium, so your plate is lighter than the panel says.
• Salt used to draw water out of a vegetable is counted in full, even though most of it leaves with the water you wring away.

Both errors point the same way: the number printed is the higher one. If you are watching sodium, we would rather be wrong in the direction that does not cost you anything.

And what we never count: salt added at the table. We do not know your taste. A quarter teaspoon of fine salt is about 575 mg of sodium — worth knowing, and yours to decide.

Rounding

Calories and sodium are rounded to whole numbers. Protein, fibre, carbohydrate, net carbs and saturated fat are rounded to one decimal, because at these portion sizes a tenth of a gram is the difference between two honest answers and hiding one.

Net carbs are printed beside total carbohydrate, not instead of it, so you can check the subtraction yourself.

What happens when we cannot read a line

This is the part we are quietly proud of. If an ingredient line does not resolve to a row in the table — an unfamiliar name, a typo, a food we have not catalogued — the recipe does not publish. It is not quietly counted as zero and it is not estimated.

There is no entry in our table for the word «water» on its own, and that is deliberate: matching takes the longest name it recognises, so a line reading «1 tin of tuna in water, drained» would match water before tuna and print a tuna dish as nought calories and nought protein. Rather than allow that, lines like it are left unresolved and stop the build.

An empty panel looks like a mistake. A wrong panel looks like a fact. We would rather stop.

What we still cannot know

Your courgette is wetter than ours. Your feta is saltier. You wrung the cloth harder, or not as hard. These figures are a careful, consistent estimate built from a recipe you can read in full — not a laboratory result for the plate in front of you.

How much of any of this is right for you is a question for your doctor or a registered dietitian, not for a recipe site. What a recipe site can honestly do is show its work. This is ours.

About Salt, and the Number on the Card

Salt is not in most of these recipes. That is deliberate, and it is not the same as food that tastes of nothing.

Look down any ingredient list here and you will find lemon, vinegar, capers, olives, mustard, feta, parmesan. Those are doing the work salt usually does. Acid and salty cheese make a plate read as seasoned, and they cost a fraction of the sodium. A dish finished with a squeeze of lemon off the heat needs far less salt than the same dish without it — and it is the lemon you taste, not the lack.

Where salt does appear, it is there because it cannot be added later. There are only five such places, and you will meet all of them in our books:

• In the water — for grains, potatoes, blanched greens. Salt gets inside the food only from there.
• Drawing water out — grated zucchini, eggplant, cucumber. Here the salt is a tool, not a flavour: most of it leaves with the water you wring away.
• On meat, half an hour ahead. Salt needs that time to travel inwards. Salt at the table sits on the surface and does something else entirely.
• In a mince. Salt is what makes the mixture hold together. A patty made from unsalted mince falls apart in the pan, and no amount of salt afterwards will put it back.
• In a batter or a bake — a pinch, and not for saltiness: sweet things read flat without it.

Everywhere else, salt waits for you. Season at the table, to your own taste, in front of your own plate.

What the sodium figure means

The number printed on each card is a floor, not a ceiling. It counts everything the recipe lists, and nothing you add yourself.

• A quarter teaspoon of fine salt is about 575 mg of sodium. An eighth is about 290 mg. That is worth knowing before the cellar comes out, because a generous hand can double a card.
• Where salt is used to draw water out of a vegetable, we still count all of it, even though most of it goes down the drain with the water. The real figure on your plate is lower than the one printed — never higher.
• «Salt to taste» is never counted, because we do not know your taste.

How much sodium is right for you is your number, not ours. It depends on your blood pressure, your kidneys and what else you eat in a day, and it is a question for your doctor or a registered dietitian — not for a cookbook. What a cookbook can honestly do is tell you exactly what is in the dish before you pick up the salt, and that is what these figures are for.