Tomatoes – yes or no?? I use tinned tomatoes quite a lot, especially this time of year when I haven’t got any growing and the ones in the supermarket are under taste and over priced.

So yesterday I had what i call “spanish eggs”. 1/2 onion with garlic cooked off, then add a tin of chopped tomatoes – boil for a bit and then poach an egg or 2 in the mixture with the lid on.

So when I go to the end of yesterday and had consumed 43g of carbs. I did have a peach (8.4 carbs) and some strawberries (2.9). So I checked through the diary and found my spanish egg recipe had 23g – with a tin of toms being 18.8g carbs – what that’s about. I definitely choose tins that have no added sugar so decided I’d compared tinned to fresh. Here we go:
400g fresh toms – 12.0 cabs
400g tinned whole toms – 16.8
400g tinned chopped toms – 18.8
400g passata – 25.4

So does this mean we need to avoid the tinned stuff? – which is a same because I love my spanish eggs

It’s all about quantity really. Yes, you can have your Spanish eggs, but use a smaller quantity of tomatoes to keep the carbs down. I’m afraid carbs hide out in all sorts of places, so we have to be aware of this if we are trying to keep low carb. You haven’t said what daily carb intake you are aiming for, but if it is under 50g a day, you might well decide to make a considerable cut in the quantity of tomatoes you eat.

So to summarise, it’s not an outright no to tomatoes of any kind, but it is an eat with caution.

Just use less of them. I’m sure your Spanish eggs will still be delicious even if you decrease the tomatoes by half. Watch out for the onion too. They’re surprisingly high in carbs and can get very large and heavy, so weighing and counting is key. I used to chop an onion and throw into pretty much everything. Nowadays it’s green onions and shallots for me.

Alternatively, when the really good fresh summer tomatoes come in, you could make a little project of canning them. My parents are old school Yankees and they can like crazy people come tomato harvest. It’s time consuming but not difficult or complicated at all, and having scads of delicious tomatoes canned at peak ripeness for the rest of the year is worth a little trouble.

I can understand there being a difference between fresh, tinned tomatoes and passata – fresh have skins and pips, tinned have no skin and passata has both removed, so for the same weight there will be more pulp. A difference between tinned and chopped doesn’t make any sense – they’re the same thing, just one is chopped.

I wonder if its a volume of solids issue. You can fit more chopped tomatoes in a cup, for example, than you can whole ones. I know the weight is the same, but the juice/water in the can could make up the difference.

Perhaps that’s it. I was imagining the juice to be higher carbs than the pulp, but it might not be.