Calories in paneer, raw and in five common dishes

Paneer occupies an odd place in Indian food tracking. It is the vegetarian protein everyone reaches for, and it is also about half fat by calories, which means it is frequently eaten as though it were free.

The base numbers

खाना	मात्रा	कैलोरी	प्रोटीन (ग्राम)	कार्ब्स (ग्राम)	फैट (ग्राम)
Paneer, buffalo milk	100 g	296	18.3	2	24
Paneer, cow milk	100 g	258	18.9	2.5	20
Paneer, low fat	100 g	196	20	3	12
Tofu, firm	100 g	144	15.5	3	8.7

स्रोत: IFCT 2017

The useful way to read this: paneer gives you roughly 6 kcal per gram of protein. Curd gives about 17 kcal per gram of protein at full fat and far less at low fat. Chicken breast gives about 5. Tofu gives about 9.

So paneer is a reasonable protein source, not an outstanding one, and it becomes a poor one once it is cooked in cream.

Serving sizes people actually eat

A "serving" of paneer is rarely weighed, which is where the estimates go wrong.

• Four or five cubes from a curry: 50 to 70 g
• A generous helping of paneer bhurji: 100 to 120 g
• Two paneer tikka skewers: 120 to 150 g
• A paneer roll or wrap: 60 to 80 g

A person logging "one serving paneer" from a database is usually recording something between 50 and 150 g without knowing which. Weighing your usual portion once fixes it permanently, in the same way as the katori calibration in how to track calories without a food scale.

What the gravy adds

This is where paneer dishes separate from paneer.

खाना	मात्रा	कैलोरी	प्रोटीन (ग्राम)	कार्ब्स (ग्राम)	फैट (ग्राम)
Paneer bhurji	1 katori	290	16	6	23
Palak paneer	1 katori	300	16	9	23
Kadai paneer	1 katori	330	16	11	26
Paneer butter masala	1 katori	400	17	14	33
Shahi paneer	1 katori	430	17	16	36

स्रोत: Calculated from IFCT 2017 ingredient values

The paneer in every row is the same 80 g, worth about 237 kcal. Everything above that is oil, butter, cream and cashew paste. In the richest dishes the gravy contributes more calories than the paneer does.

This is the general pattern of Indian restaurant food and the reason how much oil is actually in your curry matters more than any individual ingredient lookup.

Restaurant versus home

Assume a restaurant paneer dish is 30 to 50 per cent higher than the home version of the same name. Restaurants use more cream, more butter and often a cashew-based gravy that is dense in both fat and carbohydrate.

A restaurant paneer butter masala can exceed 500 kcal for a katori-sized portion, and a full portion as served is often two katoris. Use the defaults in how to log a restaurant meal you didn't cook rather than a home-recipe database entry.

Making paneer work in a deficit

Three adjustments, in order of effect.

Change the cooking, not the paneer. Paneer tikka, grilled or air-fried, with yoghurt marinade, is 200 kcal for 100 g of paneer plus marinade. The same paneer in a cream gravy is 400.

Use cow-milk or low-fat paneer. Around a third fewer calories for the same protein. Texture differs and most people stop noticing within a week.

Weigh it. Paneer is dense enough that eyeballing costs you 100 kcal easily. It is one of the foods worth keeping the scale out for, alongside oil and nuts.

Paneer against the alternatives

For a vegetarian trying to reach a protein target, the comparison that matters is calories per gram of protein.

Low-fat curd and skyr-style yoghurt beat paneer comfortably. Tofu and soya chunks beat it. Eggs, if you eat them, beat it. Paneer beats nuts, cheese and most legumes.

None of that makes paneer a bad choice — it makes it a food to portion rather than a food to rely on. The full comparison is in paneer or tofu: the protein comparison in full and the wider picture in vegetarian protein worth the calories it costs.

Protein per meal, practically

A 100 g serving of paneer supplies about 18 g of protein. For most adults, a meal wants 25 to 35 g to make full use of it, which is the argument in protein timing: what matters and what doesn't.

That means paneer plus dal, or paneer plus curd, rather than paneer alone — which is also a cheaper way to build the meal than adding another 100 g of paneer at 290 kcal.