Calories in Aloo ki Sabzi

The figure is for a plain home-style potato curry: 100 g of potato, 50 g of tomato and 30 g of onion cooked in 2 teaspoons of oil, with water for the gravy, all served as one bowl. As a recipe it is restrained. The same sabzi ladled out at a puri stall or a wedding counter generally carries more oil floating on top, and a home katori may hold less potato than the full 100 g. So 181 kcal describes this recipe and this bowl, and the bowl in front of the reader may sit on either side of it.

Potato has a reputation as the fattening part of a meal, but the split here says otherwise. Carbohydrate, mostly potato starch, supplies 47% of the energy and fat supplies 46%, and that fat is simply the 2 teaspoons of oil. Protein is 7%. In other words, two small spoons of oil bring nearly as much energy as all the vegetables in the bowl. This is why aloo ki sabzi, at 181 kcal, is lighter than the oilier aloo methi at 276 kcal even though both start from the same amount of potato.

A bowl of aloo ki sabzi is about 9% of a sedentary man's daily energy requirement and 11% of a woman's. Two bowls come to 362 kcal and 42 g of carbohydrate. Since the dish is starch plus oil with only 3.1 g of protein, it pairs poorly with more starch alone: aloo and puri, or aloo and rice, leaves the plate short of protein. A katori of dal or curd beside it, and a salad, makes a more rounded meal than a second helping.

The caveat with aloo ki sabzi is that it is mostly quick-digesting starch: 21 g of carbohydrate with little protein to slow the meal down. People who monitor their blood sugar should count the potato together with the roti, puri or rice on the plate, and keep to the amounts their doctor or dietitian has advised.