Keto at the festive table

At Christmas and Easter the table is built around a roast, which is the easy part if you are on keto. The tricky bits are everything that comes with it: the stuffing, the tray of potatoes, the bread, the tsoureki and the sweets that sit on the table for days.

The meat

Roast turkey, skin and all, has 0.06 g per 100 g, while pork loin, lamb and the Easter goat are all at 0.

The carbs come from what goes on top of the meat. If the pork has a honey glaze (82 g per 100 g), cut off the glazed skin and leave it at the side of the plate. At home, lamb roasts beautifully with garlic, lemon and oregano, as in our Roast lamb with green salad and tzatziki. And if you want turkey without heating the oven for a whole bird, Turkey breast with buttered spinach is done in a frying pan.

The red-dyed Easter eggs need no thought at all, since a large 50 g egg has half a gram.

The stuffing

Turkey stuffing is usually made with mince, rice and chestnuts. The mince has no carbs, but boiled rice has 28.7 g per 100 g and roast chestnuts 47.9, so just 50 g of chestnuts on your plate brings 24 g.

If stuffing is non-negotiable, make it with mince and mushrooms (2.4 g per 100 g) and leave out the rice and chestnuts.

Potatoes and bread

Most of the carbs on a festive plate come from the tray of potatoes.

Cauliflower mash is in our Lemon chicken with cauliflower mash and cauliflower "rice" in the keto stuffed peppers.

The sweets

Festive sweets are hard to resist when they sit on the table from Christmas Eve to Epiphany. In our database melomakarona, the honey and walnut biscuits, have 50 g per 100 g from Violanta and 61 from Faidon, so 50 g gives you 25 to 30. Kourabiedes, the almond shortbread, reach 66 per 100 g, and the Easter tsoureki has 51.7, so a 50 g slice brings 26.

Of our own recipes, the ones that look the part on a festive table are the Keto cheesecake with an almond base (4.1 g a slice), the Keto chocolate mousse (7 g a pot) and the Keto butter biscuits (1.6 g for two). All of them are sweetened with erythritol, which has 0 g net in our database.

A festive plate in grams

Take a Christmas plate for one: 250 g of turkey, 150 g of boiled cauliflower, 100 g of cabbage dressed with oil, two 150 ml glasses of red wine and a slice of keto cheesecake. The whole lot comes to about 18 g (7.8 g of it from the wine), just under the 20 g limit of strict keto explained in How many carbs a day on keto.

Swap the cauliflower for roast potatoes and the cheesecake for 50 g of melomakarona, though, and the same plate reaches 70 g.