Spiced Rice and Red Lentil Kitchari with Cucumber Yoghurt: where the numbers come from

Per ingredient

Oxalate

67 mg per serving (134 mg for the whole recipe, divided by 2). 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.

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.

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.

Red Lentils

Recipe weighs 220 g red lentils, rinsed, before simmering, so the hulled dry record applies; the canned lentil record used in the ledger is a different product and would badly understate the dry weight's density.

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.

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.

Fresh Ginger

Weighed raw and peeled before slicing or grating; the dried ground ginger record is a separate site ingredient and would be far too concentrated here.

Ground Cumin

Measured dry from the jar; the ground cumin seed record matches the ledger canonical 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.

Mild Curry Powder

Measured dry from the jar; the plain curry powder record is the only spice-blend entry and no mild-specific record exists.

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.

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.

Low-Fat Yoghurt

Recipe lines say plain low-fat yogurt, and AUSNUT has an explicit low fat (under 0.5%) tier, so it is preferred over the reduced fat (~2%) record which describes a different labelled product.

Cucumber

Weighed raw, mostly unpeeled and diced or cut into matchsticks; ledger key carried over verbatim from the published book.

Fresh Mint

Fresh leaves picked from the stem and weighed raw, which is the state every recipe adds them in; the dried-herb record would misstate both water content and volume.

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.