Soft Pasta with Roasted Capsicum Sauce and Fine Turkey: where the numbers come from

Per ingredient

Oxalate

62 mg per serving (247 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 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.

Capsicum

Weighed raw, whether diced or roasted; red capsicum record used. Consolidated from a duplicate capsicum record that mapped to the same AUSNUT food.

Turkey Mince

Weighed raw before it is browned or poached into fine crumbs; the cooked mince record was rejected because the weight is taken raw.

Pasta

Weighed dry, before boiling, and used where the recipe says pasta without naming a grain. A recipe asking for wholemeal by name uses the separate wholemeal-pasta ingredient, which carries three times the fibre.

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.

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.

Parmesan

Weighed as a hard cheese and grated at the point of use; the fresh parmesan record matches the ledger canonical and is preferred over the dried finely grated record, which is far more concentrated.

Low Sodium Stock

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

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.

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.