trust but verify

There's faith, and then there's gullibility.

Yesterday, I made some cornbread from a recipe in Julee Russo's Great Good Food cookbook, more or less. (I skipped the herbs, and baked it as muffins instead of as a single cornbread cake in a cast-iron skillet). One of the things that appealed to me was the carb count given for each serving (one-twelfth portion), 6 grams.

Now sometimes I am naive but that number looked suspiciously low to me, and so after dinner, while I continued the reconstruction of my ingredient nutrition information database, I looked up a few types of cornmeal -- there was a whole cup of it in this bread.

Typical supermarket cornmeal, degermed and enriched, has 107 grams of carbs per cup, and about 10 grams of fiber, according to the USDA database. Fancy-pants whole grain corn meal from Bob's Red Mill has about 94 grams of carbs, with 9 grams of fiber. I'm pretty good at math, and spotted right away that both 107 and 94 (or 97 and 85, to go with the net count) are both substantially greater than 72, which is 6*12. And that's not even counting the cup of whole kernels, which clock in with another 32 grams (net fiber) of carbs. If we throw in the carbs from the yogurt (used in lieu of buttermilk) and the honey, it adds up to more like 12 grams, which isn't that big of a deal to me, but to someone who's really counting every gram, is quite shockingly far from accurate.

But still quite tasty with butter and jam this morning. Made a nice breakfast.