Calories in Kashmiri Kahwa

The databank's recipe makes 2 cups and sweetens them with 25 g of sugar, about 12 g to a cup. Tea leaves, saffron, cardamom, cinnamon and water are not counted because they bring practically no energy. So the 64 kcal describes a sweet kahwa in an ordinary tea cup, roughly the way it is offered to a guest. In a small traditional cup the serving is less; in a mug it is more. Kahwa made at home with a pinch of sugar, or with none, is a very different drink in calorie terms from the one this figure describes.

Carbohydrate supplies 80% of the energy, and nearly all of that is sugar: 13.2 g of the 13.4 g of carbohydrate is counted as sugars, most of it the 12 g stirred into the cup. Fat supplies 17% and protein 2%. The recipe's ingredient list names only the sugar, so the 1.3 g of fat most likely reflects the few almonds that kahwa is traditionally finished with. Unlike chai, kahwa has no milk, which is why it has almost no protein, and why its calories are so simply explained: sugar first, a trace from nuts second, nothing else.

A cup of sweetened kahwa is about 3% of a sedentary man's daily energy requirement and 4% of a woman's. Kahwa is usually drunk after a meal or through a cold afternoon, in more than one cup: three cups come to 192 kcal and 40.2 g of carbohydrate, practically all of it sugar. It adds no real protein or fibre to the meal it follows, so it is best counted as a sweet drink and not as food. Brewed without sugar it becomes close to a plain spiced tea, and then the number of cups stops mattering much for calories.

The only figure worth watching in kahwa is sugar: 13.2 g of sugars in one cup of this recipe, with very little fat and almost no protein beside it. Kahwa is often described as a remedy for digestion, colds or weight. Nothing in the data supports or measures any of that; the data shows a sweetened spiced tea. People with diabetes should take their doctor's or dietitian's advice on sweetened drinks, this one included.