Vegetables & Sides Calories

Vegetables should be the safest thing on your plate, and steamed or lightly stir fried, they are. This is the category you pile on when you want a mountain of food for almost nothing. Volume eating starts here, whether that is a plate of kangkung, a bowl of sayur asem, or the banchan on a Korean table.

But be honest with yourself about the oil. Kangkung belacan glistening under the lamp at the tai chow is not a health food anymore, and neither is laing cooked in a litre of coconut milk. The ranking below shows which veg dishes are basically free and which ones are secretly a main.