Braised Silken Tofu with Fine Chicken in a Mild Tomato Sauce: where the numbers come from

Per ingredient

Oxalate

25 mg per serving (102 mg for the whole recipe, divided by 4). This comes from the Oxalosis and Hyperoxaluria Foundation list rather than the Australian composition data above, which does not carry oxalate.

Water

Tap water carries no oxalate: oxalate is a plant metabolite and drinking water is not a plant.

Low Sodium Stock

Prepared liquid stock is water with roughly one to two per cent solids. The OHF lists no stock, and treating it as an unknown would put an unresolved line in a third of the recipes on the site over a contribution too small to change a band.

Oxalate in a plant moves with variety, ripeness, soil and cooking, and what you absorb depends on the calcium eaten in the same meal rather than on the figure alone. The full table and what it is worth.

Not counted

These lines contribute nothing to the figures above, because they carry no weight or no composition match. Finishing salt and pepper added to taste are deliberately excluded: the amount is the cook's, so counting it would be inventing a number.

• black pepper, to taste

Why these records

Where a generic database item cannot represent an ingredient exactly, the choice is recorded with the ingredient rather than left to inference.

Soft Tofu

Recipe lines say soft or silken tofu, drained, weighed straight from the pack; the firm and cooked tofu records were rejected as compositionally different.

Chicken Mince

Weighed raw before it is browned or poached; the cooked mince record was rejected because cooking loss would double-count the weight change.

White Rice

Nutrition is computed on the dry basis. Cooked rice has no reproducible composition: its nutrient density depends entirely on how much water was absorbed, which varies by method and cook. The nutrients come from the dry grain and cooking only adds water, so recipes weigh this ingredient dry and state the cooked amount in the method.

Water

Contributes no energy or nutrients but mapped honestly rather than skipped; tap water is what the recipes use, and the ledger left this unkeyed.

No-Added-Salt Canned Tomatoes

Ingredient name explicitly specifies no added salt, matching this record exactly; ledger key carried over verbatim from the published book.

Frozen Peas

Weighed frozen, which is compositionally the raw green pea; AUSNUT has no frozen pea record. The canned drained record was rejected because it carries added brine sodium the recipes do not use.

Onion

Weighed raw and peeled before it is softened in the pan; ledger key carried over verbatim from the published book.

Garlic

Weighed or counted as raw peeled cloves before cooking; ledger key carried over verbatim from the published book.

Olive Oil

Measured from the bottle, plain or extra-virgin; AUSNUT has a single olive oil record and the ledger key is carried over verbatim.

Low Sodium Stock

Measured as ready-to-use reduced-salt chicken or vegetable liquid stock; record used for this ingredient for stock, and the all-flavours record covers both.

Tomato Paste

Recipe lines say tomato paste without qualification, unlike the site's explicit no-added-salt-canned-tomatoes ingredient, so ordinary added-salt paste is the honest reading and the more conservative sodium choice at 630 mg versus 36 mg per 100 g.

Cornflour Cornstarch

Weighed as dry powder for slurries; the pure maize starch record is preferred over the maize-and-wheat blend because the ingredient name says cornflour or cornstarch.

Unsalted Butter

Ingredient name specifies unsalted, so the plain no-added-salt butter record is used rather than the salted or not-further-defined records.

Dried Oregano

Weighed dry from the jar in 1-3 g amounts; ledger key carried over verbatim from the published book.

Caster Sugar

Caster is simply finer-milled white granulated sugar with identical composition; AUSNUT has no caster-specific record, so the white granulated record is used.

Salt

Weighed or added to taste from the packet; iodised table salt matches the fine salt the recipes specify, and the ledger key is carried over verbatim.

What this is and is not

These figures match the ones shown on the recipe page exactly, because both come from this same arithmetic.

A composition database gives representative values for a food, not an analysis of your tin, your loaf or your cut of meat. Brands differ, produce varies, and yields change with how long something cooked and how hard it was drained. Treat every figure here as an estimate of the right order rather than a measurement, and where a number matters clinically, take it to whoever is managing your care. CERNERE publishes the working so it can be argued with, not to imply a precision food does not have.