Calories in Beans Thoran

Thoran in Kerala and poriyal in Tamil Nadu are the same idea: a finely chopped vegetable, steamed in its own moisture and finished with grated coconut and a tadka of mustard seeds and curry leaves. The recipe behind this figure uses 100 g of French beans, a little onion, 20 g of coconut and 2 teaspoons of oil and treats the result as one bowl. On a sadya leaf or beside rice and sambar, the spoonful of thoran actually served is usually smaller than that, so a home portion may well come in under 197 kcal.

Beans thoran gets its energy from two fats, not one. Fat supplies 78% of the total, carbohydrate 14% and protein 8%, and the 17 g of fat is shared between the cooking oil and the coconut. The coconut is why more of that fat is saturated than in a sabzi cooked in oil alone. The beans themselves are light and supply most of the 8.4 g of fibre. So the dish is very low in starch, with only 6.6 g of carbohydrate, and high in fibre, but it is not a low-fat side.

A full bowl of beans thoran is about 9% of a sedentary man's daily energy requirement and 12% of a woman's. In a rice meal, thoran is the fibre: 8.4 g a bowl, against very little in the white rice itself. It adds only 3.9 g of protein, so the sambar, dal, curd or fish served with it does that work. Two bowls come to 394 kcal and 34 g of fat, which is more fat than most people would expect from a plate of beans.

The kind of fat is what sets beans thoran apart: coconut fat is largely saturated, so a good part of the bowl's 17 g of fat is too, where a sabzi cooked only in vegetable oil has far less. Thoran made with coconut oil adds to that. People who have been asked to limit saturated fat or salt, for example for raised cholesterol or blood pressure, should take their doctor or dietitian's guidance on how much coconut and salt suits them.