Nutrition & health

Protein-Rich Vegetarian Salad Ingredients

I’m vegetarian and my salads never keep me full.

The single most common reason a vegetarian salad fails as a meal is that nobody put protein in it. Twelve ingredients, with the numbers, from an all-veg kitchen.

By · Sourced nutrition, food safety and kitchen notes · Pure Bites, Surat

· Updated · 2 min read

A Greek-style bowl with paneer cubes, olives, tomato and cucumber
A Greek-style bowl with paneer cubes, olives, tomato and cucumber

A bowl of vegetables is a side dish. A bowl of vegetables with 18 g of protein in it is lunch. In a pure-veg kitchen that difference is the entire job, and it is easier than people think — there is no shortage of vegetarian protein, only a shortage of putting it in the bowl.

How much you are aiming for

For a meal that holds you four to five hours, 15–20 g of protein is the target. Across a day most adults do well somewhere around 0.8–1 g per kg of body weight, more if you train seriously or are over sixty. Those are population guidelines, not a prescription — if you are managing kidney disease or any condition that affects protein needs, that number is your doctor’s to set, not ours.

Combining is easier than the internet suggests

You may have read that plant proteins are "incomplete" and must be combined at every meal. The first half is roughly true — most single plant foods are low in one or two essential amino acids. The second half is not: your body maintains a pool of amino acids across the day, so eating a legume at lunch and a grain at dinner works fine. A dal-and-rice culture solved this centuries before anyone measured it.

Four combinations we use most

  1. Chickpea + hung curd dressing + pumpkin seeds — about 20 g, and the dressing does double duty.
  2. Paneer + moong sprouts + peanuts — around 22 g, our highest-protein bowl.
  3. Tofu + quinoa + edamame or peas — about 19 g, the lightest of the four.
  4. Rajma + roasted chana + curd — around 18 g, and the cheapest by a distance.

Two mistakes worth avoiding

  • Counting cheese as the protein when it is mostly the fat. Processed cheese slices are around 4 g protein each and a lot of sodium. Paneer is a different food.
  • Relying on greens. Spinach has about 2 g per 100 g. You would need a kilo. It is not the protein source; it is what the protein sits on.

See the bowls and their panels

Sources