Chicken and Vegetable Rice Pilaf: where the numbers come from

Per ingredient

Oxalate

43 mg per serving (173 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.

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.

• Ground 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.

Chicken Thigh

Weighed raw as boneless skinless thighs before cooking; ledger key carried over verbatim from the published book.

Basmati 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.

Onion

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

Carrot

Weighed raw, peeled and sliced or grated, before any cooking; 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.

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.

Ground Cumin

Measured dry from the jar; the ground cumin seed record matches the record used for cumin.

Ground Coriander

Ground dried coriander seed from the spice jar, not the fresh leaf, weighed as the dry powder the recipe spoons in.

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.

Flat Leaf Parsley

Weighed raw as fresh leaves for finishing; ledger key carried over verbatim from the published book.

Lemon Juice

Measured as squeezed juice, not whole fruit; ledger key carried over verbatim from the published book.

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.