stromboli (Photo credit: petitshoo)
So, I recently fell in love. There’s a little shop in Princeton called D’Angelo Italian Market, on the corner of Spring Street and South Tulane, and something there caught my eye. They have a great little Italian market, as the name implies, with fresh food everyday, but the real gem is in the trattoria. There you’ll find Grandma style (rustic) pizza, soups, the most amazing hot pressed panini, and really delicious fresh bread, if a bit oily to the touch. It is not low calorie food, but it is real food, and to me that is the important part. I’ll count the calories for delicious food every time, and enjoy it.
I fell in love most recently there with a certain spinach mozzarella roll: spinach, mozzarella, and ricotta cheeses wrapped in pizza dough and served with a quarter cup of house made sauce. It’s about 2 inches high, 8 inches long, and 3 inches wide. It is a portable, delicious, nutritious meal, but it’s a problematic relationship.
Problem 1: Small food businesses need not publish calories.
There’s the issue. D’Angelo, being a small, non-chain business, is not held to the same rules as Subway or Panera in the new national healthcare laws regarding calorie display on menus. I adore these rules — they help me to make decisions in just about every chain restaurant I go into now. But in this case, because the calorie display is not required, and likely no research has been done to even determine the calories in D’Angelo food, I’d have to guess at the calories in a slice of pizza, or breadstick, or anything, because it is not standardized in size, ingredients, or weight like packaged foods are, or even like most fast foods are. It’s real food, but I didn’t cook it, or make any decisions about what went into it, and so counting it is difficult.
Solution 1: Find out the calories of something similar
But you can guess fairly accurately with common foods like pizza, because others who make pizza of similar shape, style, and size make their calories known according to the law. For example, if I have a large plain slice from a local pizza joint, it’s often the same size, weight and style as a Papa John’s slice of Large (14 inch) original crust cheese pizza (300 calories) according to http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-papa-johns-original-crust-pizza-i54242 and so, I can safely count it as that and be within 100 calories, more or less, disregarding extra oil, cheese, dough, or sauce.
Problem 2: D’Angelo Mozzarella Spinach Rolls are not a common chain brand item.
It gets more problematic when you have a local joint specialty like a spinach mozzarella roll. It’s like a long hot pocket, but far more delicious. There are not a lot of calorie publishing places that make these, and not in the same style or size. For instance, Sbarro’s publishes their calories, and I often go to them as an example of more decadent Italian dishes. The calories are always surprisingly high, because their food is always suprisingly large, delicious (due to extra oil and cheese and dough, usually) and rich.
Solution 2: Find something like a spinach roll somewhere, and use those calories.
Like I suggested above, I was able to find something like D’Angelo Spinach rolls at Sbarro: they have a veggie stromboli, and it’s 714 calories per 10.5 ounce calzone. You can see this at this site: http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-sbarro-spinach-tomato-broccoli-stromboli-i55074 This particular site allows you to get adjusted calories according to the weight of the item, which by default is 10 ounces.
Problem 3: I have no idea what the roll I ate weighed.
Because I do not know if the spinach roll I had at D’Angelo was 10 ounces, 6 ounces, or 14 ounces, simply using Sbarro’s calories for reference is not necessarily the best idea. Just because Sbarro uses the amount of cheese, dough, and veggies that they do does not mean that D’Angelo’s will. With Pizza, it’s a bit easier, because 14 inch thin crust pizzas are kind of the norm, a standard, if you will, but in something like this, all bets are off.
Solution 3: Know everything you can about what you are eating.
I had a spinach and mozzarella roll at D’Angelo today, and as I ordered it, I noticed that there was a scale there because they sell meats and other goods by volume. I quickly asked if he could weigh it for me, and while I got kind of an puzzled, if nice, look, I really don’t care. I care much more about my nutrition and fitness than what the guy behind the counter thinks, and so should you, though he was interested when I explained. It was 10.5 ounces, and so I feel quite safe using Sbarro’s calories as a guideline for my counting.
D’Angelo Italian Market http://goo.gl/maps/TtQkI
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