25 August 2026

Why I cost every recipe to the gram

People assume this series came out of an interest in nutrition. It did not. It came out of years of work where getting the number wrong was somebody else's problem before it was mine.

I cooked for the best part of 20 years. The first stretch was as a civilian cook for a contract caterer feeding a forces base. What nobody tells you about a base kitchen is the arithmetic: a full hall, three times a day, every day, on a budget a head that did not move when the price of beef did. You do not cook a dish there. You cook it for the whole hall, and then you cook it again on Thursday. I fed soldiers. I was never one.

That is where I learned the thing these books are about, and I learned it by accident. Cook a shepherd's pie for a hall often enough and you stop seeing a recipe. You start seeing which parts are load-bearing and which parts are there because the last cook did it that way.

The fighters' kitchen is the one that matters

Then I cooked in a training camp for fighters, most of them making weight. A coach and a qualified dietitian set each fighter's numbers. I made the food hit them: fewer calories, the same protein, and still something a hungry person would want to eat in week six of a cut. The dietitian set the number, I made the food. I am going to keep saying that, because it is the distinction the whole thing rests on and it is the one people get wrong.

After that came product development: ready meals and meal kits where the calories and the protein were printed on the box before the recipe existed, and the recipe had to land on them every time it was made.

Why it matters for a cookbook

Here is the difference between those rooms and a cookbook, and it is the whole argument.

If you take 15g of oil out of a recipe that ships in a box with a printed figure on the side, somebody notices immediately, because the figure moves and a person whose job it is checks it.

If you take 15g of oil out of a dish in a cookbook, nobody notices anything. There is no printed figure to move. There is no person whose job it is. Which is exactly why cookbooks do it constantly and say nothing at all about what it did to the dish.

So this series applies a factory discipline to a domestic book. Every figure is computed from the recipe's own weighed ingredient list against public food-composition databases, and the appendix in every book prints the exact database row used for each ingredient. Not because it is difficult. Because once you have spent years in kitchens where you could not get away with skipping it, it stops feeling optional.

What I am not

I am not a nutritionist. I am not a dietitian. I have no qualification in either and nothing in these books is dietary advice. I never had a Michelin star and never wanted one. And I am not Italian, or Japanese, or Polish, or anybody's grandmother, which is exactly why the series is called Authentic-ish rather than something with the word traditional in it.

What I am claiming is kitchen authority, and it is volume and repetition rather than fame. I cooked for a full hall every day, then for fighters whose dietitian checked every number, then to the figure printed on a box. That is the entire qualification and it is the only one on offer.

The full method, with the 15 swaps for each cuisine and what every one of them costs you, is free at /swaps.

The swap kit is free, and it is the part of the book you would use most.