In October we put 600 everyday recipes through FodScale. They came from 42 popular, mainstream recipe sites, picked at random rather than chosen because they looked easy. We scored each one as written, ran it through Make it safe, and then read the adapted version side by side with the original, asking one question: is this still the dish, and could you actually cook it and enjoy it?
The answer was humbling at first. It got a lot better, and how it got better taught us more about cooking than about FODMAPs.
Most recipes start red, and that is normal
As written, 505 of the 600 recipes scored red. That is not a judgement on the recipes. Everyday cooking is built on exactly the foods the low-FODMAP diet restricts:
- Garlic was behind 240 of the red scores, and onion behind 183. At least one of the two showed up in 309 of them, about six in ten.
- For 120 recipes, onion, garlic or shallot was the only problem.
- Wheat (flour, pasta, bread, crusts) appeared in 224, and milk, cream or soft cheese in 158.
If you have ever felt that the diet rules out everything you want to cook, these numbers say you are not imagining it. Onion and garlic alone account for most of it.
What Make it safe could do
Of the 505 red recipes, Make it safe brought 290 to green and 72 to yellow. That is 362, or about seven in ten. For the 120 recipes where onion or garlic was the only problem, 98 came back green or yellow.
The other 143 split two ways. For 90, the adapted version would work, but only if you accept a change that is yours to decide, so FodScale says so instead of deciding for you. The remaining 53 we decline to adapt, because any version we could make would be a different dish.
What went wrong at first
In the first round, 53 of 200 adapted recipes were broken: technically low FODMAP, but not something you would want to cook. A creamy sauce cut to a quarter of its volume. A stuffed vegetable with a third of its filling. A soup that had lost the one thing it was named for.
By the third round, a recheck of every recipe the first review had flagged found none broken. The fix was not a longer list of swaps. It was a handful of rules about cooking.
- Keep the bulk. When an ingredient has to be cut back, something low FODMAP from the same family takes up the space. If a sauce, a cream or a binder would have to be cut deeply, the dish is flagged instead of thinned. We wrote a whole post on this rule: Making a recipe safe without wrecking it.
- Garlic oil is not a head of garlic. Garlic-infused oil can stand in for a few cloves. It cannot replace two whole heads in a dish built on garlic, and pretending it can gives you a plain stir fry with a misleading name. Those are flagged as your call.
- A dish named for an ingredient keeps that ingredient, or says so. Cashew chicken with peanuts is a different dish. You might be happy with it, but it should be your choice.
- The recipe's own alternatives come first. If a recipe already says "honey or sugar", the sugar is the better swap, because the cook who wrote it has tested it.
- Small extras with no swap are left out, and you are told. Two teaspoons of something in a big dish can usually go, and the dish survives. A missing ingredient you were never told about is how trust gets lost.
- Weigh what is really there. "Two small cucumbers, about 2 lb" means 2 lb, not two of an average cucumber. A drained can of beans weighs much less than its label. Getting the weight wrong gets the score wrong.
- Soups need their own handling. Whole garlic cloves simmered in broth leave their FODMAPs in the liquid, even if you fish the cloves out, because the fructans in garlic dissolve in water (Monash, cooking with onion and garlic). The low-FODMAP way is to leave them out and stir a little garlic-infused oil into each bowl.
Some things cannot be low FODMAP, and that is OK
A few dishes are their high-FODMAP ingredient: a garlic soup, a chickpea curry where the chickpeas are the meal, a honey cake. FodScale says so rather than handing you a sad imitation. Knowing a dish is for later, perhaps after you have learned what you tolerate during reintroduction, is useful information too.
What this means in your kitchen
- Start with onion and garlic. In most recipes they are the whole problem. Scallion greens, leek leaves, chives and garlic-infused oil cover a lot of ground.
- Find the dish's backbone before you change anything. If the swap touches the thing the dish is named for, or what holds it together, think twice.
- Weigh it. Low-FODMAP serves are published in grams, and a scale is the only way to know where a plate lands.
- Treat a flag as information, not failure. A dish marked "your call" is FodScale being honest about a trade-off only you can judge.
FodScale applies published portion science mechanically. It is not medical advice and does not know your triggers; a dietitian can help you through elimination and reintroduction.