Cottage Pie with Fine Beef and Soft Potato Mash: where the numbers come from

Per ingredient

Oxalate

59 mg per serving (235 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.

Skim Milk Powder

The OHF has no milk powder. Fluid milk is used, which understates the powder per gram because the water has been removed from it.

Low Sodium Beef 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 many recipes 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.

Lean Beef Mince

Weighed raw before browning; the ~5-10% fat raw mince record matches the record used for beef mince and suits the lean description without going to the under-5-percent record.

Potato

Weighed raw, peeled and diced, before boiling or roasting; ledger key carried over verbatim from the published book.

Cauliflower

Weighed raw as florets before cooking; the plain raw record matches the record used for cauliflower.

Reduced-Fat Milk

Ingredient name specifies reduced fat, so the ~1% fluid cow's milk record is used rather than the regular-fat record that serves the plain milk ingredient.

Skim Milk Powder

Weighed as dry powder before it is whisked into liquid milk to fortify it; the skim powder record matches the nonfat dry milk the recipes specify.

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.

Cheddar

Ingredient name does not specify reduced fat, so the regular-fat natural cheddar record is taken per the house rule; one recipe line does say reduced-fat, and the regular-fat record is the more conservative choice on energy and saturated fat.

Carrot

Weighed raw, peeled and sliced or grated, before any cooking; ledger key carried over verbatim from the published book.

Onion

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

Low Sodium Beef Stock

Weighed as ready-to-use liquid stock; AUSNUT's reduced-salt liquid stock record covers all flavours, so the same key serves beef and chicken stock.

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.

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.

Dried Thyme

Weighed or measured dry from the jar; ledger key carried over verbatim from the published book.

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.