Authentic-ish Southern

Boiled peanuts are raw peanuts boiled in salty water for hours. The salt goes in and nothing else does, so the number does not move. They come out at 567 kcal a serving either way, which is a lot, and the reason is that they are peanuts. There is no version of this that is lighter and still boiled peanuts. Eat fewer of them or eat something else.

Wilted lettuce is leaves dressed in hot bacon fat and vinegar. Take the bacon fat out and you have a salad. I tried it with more bacon and less fat to hold the protein up and made it heavier, which is the honest outcome. At 64 kcal a serving there was nothing here worth taking.

Leather britches are green beans dried on a string and cooked back to life with a piece of pork. The dish is 128 kcal a serving and it is mostly bean. Every route I tried either moved it by 7% or made it heavier. This is a preservation technique that happens to taste good, and it needs nothing.

Smoked turkey breast is a brine, smoke and time. There is no fat added anywhere and the bird is already the leanest thing in the book at 350 kcal a serving with 65g of protein. It came out at exactly the same number every time because I was subtracting from nothing. It is here so the book says plainly that the best thing in the smoke chapter needed no work.

I'll be honest: you can't have a juicy Texas smoked sausage without a bucketload of beef fat. You can add lean beef, you can stuff in protein powder, you can stand around with a water spray bottle, but all you'll get is a dry, mealy log that sawdust would envy. Fat's what binds and bastes this sausage as it smokes. Cut that too low and the whole thing's fit only for a dog treat. Every trick I know leaves you with a chewy, miserable cylinder, nothing like the real deal. If you want a protein bar, just eat a protein bar. You can't turn Texas sausage into diet food and call it anything but a downgrade.

Appalachian green beans are beans cooked long and slow with a piece of fatback until they go grey and soft. That is the dish, and people who grew up on it are not looking for a crisp bean. I cut the pork and added more bean to hold the protein, and the number went up rather than down. Cook them the way your neighbour does and eat a smaller bowl.

Killed lettuce is the same idea as wilted lettuce with more bacon grease, and it fails for the same reason. At 50 kcal a serving there is nothing to take out that leaves a dish behind.

Pole beans and potatoes came out 29% lighter, which sounds like a win, but the protein for the calories fell with it. I had taken the pork out and left beans and potato behind. That is a smaller plate rather than a better one, and this book does not print smaller plates as recipes.

This one is in here for two reasons and neither of them is arithmetic. The first is that I cannot count it honestly. The house convention in this book is that fried food takes up 12% of its own weight in oil, and that figure comes from battered and coated things with a lot of surface for their size. A whole bird has skin, no coating and very little surface for 4kg of meat, so 12% is plainly wrong for it and I have no figure I would print instead. Where I cannot count something, I say so rather than guessing. The second reason is that deep-frying a turkey needs about 40 litres of oil at 175C in a vat in the open air, and every year it burns somebody's garage down. Roast the bird. If you want the crisp skin, dry-brine it uncovered in the fridge overnight and start it hot.