Calories in Boti Kebab

The recipe marinates 120 g of boneless mutton boti with 20 g of raw papaya, 30 g of curd, onion and lemon, cooks it with 2 teaspoons of oil and counts 5 kebabs. Each kebab is thus a single cube of meat, 24 g, with half a teaspoon of oil. That is how boti is threaded on a skewer, a cube at a time, so the figure is per cube and not per skewer or per plate. A restaurant plate brings a skewer or two of larger cubes, glistening with ghee. The honest unit for comparison is the weight of meat, with the cooking fat counted on top.

Fat supplies 63% of the energy, protein 28% and carbohydrate 9%. The 5.1 g of fat is partly the mutton's own and partly the half teaspoon of oil, and for a piece of meat this small the oil is a large share. The 5 g of protein comes from the 24 g of mutton. Raw papaya, curd, onion and lemon are there to tenderise and flavour; together they add the 1.7 g of carbohydrate and little else. Compared with a seekh kebab of similar size, the boti is a touch higher because of that oil.

One cube of boti is about 3% of the daily energy requirement of a sedentary man and 4% of a woman's. Three come to 219 kcal with 15 g of protein, which works as a starter for one or as the meat in a meal with roti, onion and chutney. Boti kebab has almost no carbohydrate or fibre, so it needs the salad and the bread to make a plate. Served before biryani or korma, as it often is, it adds meat and fat to a meal that already has plenty of both, and that is the occasion to stop at two or three.

Nearly two-thirds of the energy in this kebab is fat, 63%, and that is with only half a teaspoon of oil a piece. Restaurant boti, basted and served in bigger cubes, will be well above 73 kcal each. It is red meat, so people who have been advised to limit it for a heart condition, gout or raised cholesterol should go by what their doctor or dietitian has told them.