Calories in Rice Kheer

The figure belongs to one standard recipe: 250 ml of milk simmered with 10 g of raw rice and 1.5 tablespoons of sugar, all of it served as a single bowl. That makes it a milk dish with a little rice in it, closer to sweetened milk than to a rice pudding. Kheer at a wedding or from a sweet shop is usually cooked down much further, so the same bowl holds more milk solids, and it often carries cashews, raisins or a spoon of ghee that this recipe does not count. Among the 20 sweets in this set it stands 15th from the lightest, almost level with makhana kheer at 300 kcal.

Carbohydrate supplies 53% of the energy, fat 35% and protein 12%. The fat and nearly all the protein come from the milk. The carbohydrate is mostly sugar, not rice: 10 g of rice is a small spoonful, while the sugar figure for the bowl is 32.2 g once the milk's own sugar is counted along with what is stirred in. In practice the milk decides the fat, the sugar spoon decides most of the rest, and the rice is there for texture.

One bowl is about 14% of a sedentary man's daily energy requirement and 18% of a woman's, which is closer to a small meal than to a mouthful after dinner. Two bowls come to 602 kcal. In its favour, the bowl brings 9.2 g of protein from the milk, more than most sweets offer, though only 0.7 g of fibre. Served after a full thali it simply adds to the meal; as an evening bowl on its own it can stand in for a snack. Half a bowl, about 150 kcal, is often enough at the end of a meal.

Sugars and fat are the two figures to watch. One bowl is counted at 32.2 g of sugars, a number that takes in milk's natural sugar as well as the 1.5 tablespoons added, and 11.9 g of fat, nearly all of it the milk's. People managing diabetes should fit kheer into the plan their doctor or dietitian has given them and not judge it by the rice, which is the smallest part of the bowl.