High Protein Granola: 13 g per Serving, Worked Out by Ingredient

A tenth of a batch of homemade granola with seeds, whey protein and egg whites has 12.8 g of protein and 265 kcal. Plain oat-and-almond granola gives 5.3 g and 218 kcal for the same share. I built three batches from USDA records and summed them, so you can see which ingredient does the work in high protein granola.

How much protein is in regular granola?

Not much per calorie. The USDA record for homemade granola lists 13.67 g of protein and 489 kcal per 100 g, with a portion of 1 cup, 122 g. That cup holds 16.7 g of protein and 597 kcal. One ounce holds 139 kcal, so a cup is over four times the energy of an ounce.

Homemade granola (USDA record)	Portion	Protein	Energy	Protein per 100 kcal
Cereals ready-to-eat, granola, homemade	28.35 g (1 oz)	3.9 g	139 kcal	2.8 g
Cereals ready-to-eat, granola, homemade	122 g (1 cup)	16.7 g	597 kcal	2.8 g

Granola carries about 2.8 g of protein for every 100 kcal. Oil and sweetener add energy with almost no protein, as the batches below show. A scale tells you what your bowl weighs, and that ratio tells you whether it is high in protein.

What makes granola high in protein?

Seeds give a small bump, and whey gives the big one. I priced three batches of ten servings, each serving a tenth of the raw ingredients by weight. Baking drives some water off, so a baked scoop weighs a little less, but the protein per 100 kcal stays the same.

Version A is 240 g of oats, 100 g of almonds, 105 g of honey and 42 g of canola oil. Version B is the full recipe further down without the whey and the egg whites. Version C is that recipe as written.

Version (10 servings)	What is in it	Serving	Protein	Energy	Protein per 100 kcal
A. Oat and almond	oats, almonds, honey, canola oil	49 g	5.3 g	218 kcal	2.4 g
B. Seeds	A with less oats and almonds, plus pumpkin and hemp seeds	52 g	7.1 g	239 kcal	3.0 g
C. Seeds, whey, egg white	B plus whey protein powder and egg whites	65 g	12.8 g	265 kcal	4.8 g

Seeds add 1.8 g per serving for 21 kcal. Pumpkin seeds have 29.9 g of protein per 100 g and hulled hemp seeds 31.6 g. Almonds have 21.4 g and oats 13.2 g. Oats still supply 59% of the protein in version A, because there are 240 g of them.

The powder is the big step. In version C the whey gives 5.0 g of the 12.8 g, and the two egg whites give 0.7 g. Honey and oil don’t help. The 105 g of honey is 319 kcal with 0.3 g of protein, and the oil is 371 kcal with none. They make it taste like granola and hold together, and they keep the ratio low unless something else carries the protein.

How do I make high protein granola?

Mix the dry ingredients. Stir the honey and oil into the egg whites, pour that over the dry mix and toss until nothing looks dusty. Press it thin on a lined tray and bake until it dries and browns, stirring once. Cool it completely before you store it so it stays crisp. I haven’t baked any of the three, so every figure is a sum from the records.

Here is version C for ten servings, by weight.

Ingredient (USDA record)	Amount	Protein	Energy
Oats, regular, dry	200 g	26.3 g	758 kcal
Almonds, raw	80 g	17.2 g	467 kcal
Pumpkin seeds, raw	60 g	17.9 g	309 kcal
Hemp seeds, hulled	30 g	9.5 g	166 kcal
Whey protein powder	64 g (about 2/3 cup)	50.0 g	225 kcal
Egg white	68 g (2 whites)	7.3 g	37 kcal
Honey	105 g (5 tbsp)	0.3 g	319 kcal
Canola oil	42 g (3 tbsp)	0 g	371 kcal
Whole batch	649 g	128.5 g	2,653 kcal

The whey line uses a generic USDA record, and brands differ. Take the protein per gram from your own tub, and weigh the powder rather than scooping it. If you avoid dairy, soy protein isolate has 88.3 g of protein per 100 g, so 64 g of it in place of the whey gives 56.5 g for the batch instead of 50.0 g.

Weigh the finished tray and divide by ten. That’s your real serving, and you’ll find it’s lighter than the raw weights in the table.

Does the yogurt matter more than the granola?

Yes. A 156 g container of plain nonfat Greek yogurt has 16.1 g of protein and 95 kcal. Put one serving of version A on top and the yogurt supplies 75% of the bowl’s protein.

Bowl	Protein	Energy	Protein per 100 kcal
Version A + 156 g yogurt	21.4 g	314 kcal	6.8 g
Version B + 156 g yogurt	23.2 g	334 kcal	6.9 g
Version C + 156 g yogurt	28.9 g	360 kcal	8.0 g

Version C adds 7.5 g of protein over version A for about 47 kcal more in the bowl. Yogurt is the cheaper route to protein. Granola is there for the crunch. The same dairy carries savory dishes too, such as high protein buffalo chicken dip and high protein Alfredo sauce.

How much of a day’s protein is one bowl?

Take a 70 kg adult. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans put the daily goal at 1.2–1.6 g of protein per kg, or 84–112 g. One serving of version C covers 11–15% of that range. The bowl with yogurt covers 26–34%. Version A’s bowl covers 19–25%. Dinner has to carry the rest, and high protein chicken recipes weighs three of them ingredient by ingredient.

A granola breakfast assumes a healthy adult. With kidney disease, during pregnancy or breastfeeding, or under 18, let a doctor set the protein number.

The protein calculator turns your weight into a daily figure, working from 1.2 g per kg of a reference weight with a floor of 60 g. How much protein you should eat a day covers why the range is what it is.

I enter the batch in Calsa as a recipe built from its ingredients, so a bowl is a share of the batch and a guessed scoop never gets logged.