Frequently Asked Questions
Do your recipes have nutrition information?
We are adding per-serving nutrition estimates to recipes. Where you see them, here is what they are and are not.
The figures are calculated from the USDA FoodData Central database, using the ingredients and quantities listed in the recipe, divided by the number of servings stated. They are not laboratory measurements of a finished dish.
Several things move the real number away from ours:
- Ingredients vary. Two chicken thighs are not the same weight, and two brands of soy sauce are not the same sodium.
- Cooking changes things. Frying adds oil that the ingredient list doesn’t capture. Draining, reducing and skimming all remove things it does.
- You may not eat a whole serving of everything. Marinades, frying oil and simmering liquid are often listed in full but only partly consumed. This is the single largest source of error, and it usually means our figures are higher than what you actually eat.
- Serving size is our estimate. “Serves 4” is a judgement, not a measurement.
Where we cannot match an ingredient to reliable data, we leave it out of the calculation and say so rather than guessing. Some ingredients — regional seasonings especially — simply are not in the database.
Treat the numbers as a rough comparison between dishes, not as a precise count.
Are your recipes suitable for a diet?
We don’t design recipes around any particular diet, and we don’t make claims about weight loss, blood sugar, cholesterol or anything else health-related.
What we do provide is information you can use to judge for yourself:
- Allergens are declared on every recipe, based on the actual ingredient list
- Dietary notes — vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free — are stated only when the ingredients support them, with the conditions attached where they matter (a dish may be vegan only if you use vegetable stock, and we say so)
- Nutrition estimates, where available, with the limitations described above
- Substitutions, so you can adapt a recipe to what you need
I’ve read that one of your ingredients is bad for you. Why do you use it?
Home cooking uses salt, sugar, fat, alcohol, refined flour and fried food. Most traditional dishes from anywhere in the world contain at least one thing that some source describes as unhealthy.
Our position is straightforward: we write recipes for dishes as they are actually cooked and eaten, and we tell you what is in them. We don’t reformulate a traditional dish to hit a health target, and we don’t imply a dish is healthier than it is.
What we won’t do is make health claims in either direction. We don’t call a recipe “clean”, “guilt-free” or “detox”, and we don’t repeat scare stories about individual ingredients. Nutrition science is genuinely contested on many of these questions, and a recipe site is not the place to settle them.
If an ingredient is a problem for you — an allergy, a medical restriction, a religious or ethical requirement — the ingredient list and the allergen line tell you what you need to know, and most recipes include substitution notes.
How accurate are the prices in your recipes?
Cost figures are estimates in US dollars, based on average US retail prices at the time the recipe was written, and are shown as a range rather than a single number.
They will not match your receipt. Expect them to be wrong by a wide margin if:
- You are not in the United States. Prices for the same ingredient differ by several times between countries, and imported ingredients are dramatically more expensive than local ones.
- You are buying small quantities. Our estimate uses the price per gram or millilitre of a normal package. If a recipe needs one tablespoon of an oil you don’t own, your actual outlay is the whole bottle.
- Time has passed. The figure is a snapshot from when the recipe was written, and we don’t recalculate it continuously. Food prices move.
- You shop differently. Discount shops, specialist grocers and premium supermarkets can differ by a factor of two on the same item.
The number is there to answer one question: is this dish cheap or expensive relative to others on this site? It is not a shopping budget, and we would rather you treated it as a rough signal than a promise.
