Calories in Bharwa Karela

The figure is for dry stuffed karela, the kind that is slit, salted, filled with a spice masala and fried until dark. The recipe uses 80 g of bitter gourd and 1 tablespoon plus 10 g of oil, and counts that as one bowl. In practice that is not much karela, so it is a modest serving of the vegetable and a generous one of oil. A katori at home may hold less, and a cook who drains the karela after frying, or bakes it, will serve far less fat than this recipe assumes.

No other sabzi in this comparison is so completely defined by its cooking fat. Fat supplies 93% of the energy, carbohydrate 5% and protein 2%. The karela brings 2.6 g of carbohydrate, 3.2 g of fibre and almost no energy; the 23.7 g of fat is the frying oil. That is how a vegetable as light as bitter gourd ends up at 231 kcal, above baingan bharta at 212 kcal and level with palak paneer at 230 kcal, while offering 1.4 g of protein, the least of the 22 dishes.

One bowl amounts to about 11% of a sedentary man's daily energy requirement and 14% of a woman's, nearly all of it as fat. It adds almost no protein (1.4 g) and little starch, so it does nothing for the filling parts of a meal; it is there for taste. Treat it as a condiment-sized side with dal, roti and a second, lighter vegetable. Two bowls would bring 462 kcal and 47.4 g of fat, which is a great deal for a side dish.

Karela is widely believed to help with blood sugar. These figures cannot speak to that; what they show is a bowl with 2.6 g of carbohydrate and 23.7 g of fat, made from karela that is salted before it is stuffed. Nobody should adjust diabetes medicines or portions on the strength of eating karela: that is a decision for a doctor or dietitian. For everyone else, the oil and the salt are the points to watch.