Watch the full live cooking session with Chef Martin Oswald in the video above. Recipes for the creamy tofu scramble, tofu medallion with lupini bean cake, and peanut butter chocolate mousse can be found here.

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Most people think about protein the way they think about a car battery. One source doing one job in one spot. You open the hood, point to it, and say, “There it is. That’s my protein.”

A block of tofu on the plate, a scoop of beans in the bowl, and you call it handled.

But what if you’ve been thinking about plant protein all wrong? Not because the sources are bad, but because the strategy is.

That’s the idea Chef Martin Oswald brought to our live cooking session this week, and it changed how I think about building a plate. He calls it protein stacking, and the concept is so simple it’s almost annoying: instead of relying on a single protein anchor in a meal, you layer protein into every component, from the dressing to the sauce to the side dish and even dessert.

The Strategy No One Talks About

When Martin and I sat down to talk about protein and fiber (because pairing the two matters for blood sugar, satiety, and gut health), I expected him to walk through a list of high-protein plant foods. He did that. But then he did something more interesting. He cooked a full three-course meal where every single element carried protein, and none of them felt like they were trying.

The walnut dressing on your salad? That’s not just fat and acid. That’s protein and alpha-linolenic acid. The hemp seeds blended into your chocolate mousse? Thirty-three grams of protein per hundred grams. The soy milk you splash into your tofu scramble instead of water? More protein than almond or oat milk, working in the background of every dish.

Martin’s point is that most people who move toward plant-based eating make a common mistake. They identify one protein source per meal and stop there. They don’t think about the dressing, the binder, the dessert, or the cooking liquid as opportunities. But when you start stacking, those five or eight grams here and there add up fast. By the end of a three-course meal built this way, you’re easily looking at forty grams or more without ever feeling like you ate a “high-protein” diet.

The Lineup

Before Martin started cooking, he walked through his go-to plant protein sources and made a case for each one. A few stood out.

Sunflower seeds are one of the most underrated options in the plant protein world. They pack serious protein per serving, they contain vitamin E, and they cost a fraction of what you’d spend on nuts like cashews or almonds. Martin calls them the best value protein next to peanuts, and he’s not wrong. You can fold them into a dressing at lunch, sprinkle them on breakfast, and blend them into a dessert at dinner.

Pumpkin seeds carry even more protein per hundred grams and work as a topping, a snack, or a blended sauce base. Hemp seeds sit at the very top of Martin’s list. He treats them like a rescue ingredient, something you can drop into virtually anything (sauces, smoothies, baked goods, oatmeal) to boost the protein content without changing the flavor profile in any dramatic way.

And then there are lupini beans. I’ve been telling people about lupini bean flakes for a while now, and Martin confirmed what I already suspected. They’re the king of the bean protein world. The flakes dissolve into oatmeal, stir into soups, and blend into patty mixtures with almost no resistance. If you only add one new ingredient to your pantry after reading this, make it lupini bean flakes. (These are my favorite.)

Three Dishes, One Principle

Martin cooked three things during our session, and each one demonstrated protein stacking in a different context.

The Creamy Tofu Scramble

This is Martin’s riff on the scrambled eggs he grew up eating in Austria, and he’s particular about texture. He crumbles the tofu by hand rather than cutting it into cubes, which gives you a softer, more egg-like mouthfeel. The trick that separates a mediocre scramble from a great one? Two things. First, a teaspoon of cashew powder stirred in with soy milk (not water, not oat milk) to build creaminess and add protein simultaneously. Second, a squeeze of lemon juice. Martin says acidity transforms tofu scramble into a completely different product, and based on how it looked on camera, I believe him.

He served it over quinoa, stacking another protein layer underneath. Add avocado on top and you’ve got a breakfast (or dinner, honestly) that will keep you full for hours.

The Tofu Medallion with Lupini Bean Cake

This is the weekend dish, the one you make when you want to impress someone or just treat yourself. Martin sliced firm tofu through the center, cut medallion shapes with a round cutter, and then carved the edges smooth. That might sound fussy, but he explained that the rounded edges change the way the tofu feels in your mouth. Smoother, less rough on the palate.

He marinated the medallions in what he calls the “umami bomb,” a sauce built on fermented black beans that carries enormous flavor. The leftover tofu trimmings? Those became the scramble. Nothing wasted.

For the base, he made a cake (his word for it; I kept calling it a patty) from pureed chickpeas and cooked lupini bean flakes, bound with a flax egg and seasoned with the same umami sauce. The chickpea puree acts as the glue that holds everything together, and if you’re nervous about it falling apart, Martin’s advice is simple: use more chickpea puree and a little less lupini until you find the ratio that works for your hands and your pan. You can also add a tablespoon of arrowroot flour or tapioca starch to help it bind as it heats.

He layered it all on a bed of steamed spinach, topped it with the roasted tofu medallion, added a spoonful of kimchi for fermented tang, and finished it with a pureed carrot sauce. (Pro tip from Martin: if you make carrot soup one day, that same soup becomes the sauce the next day. Restaurant logic applied at home.)

Between the lupini beans, chickpeas, tofu, and spinach, this single plate carried roughly thirty plus grams of protein before you even count the walnut dressing on the salad course.

The Peanut Butter Chocolate Mousse

This is dessert where the protein isn’t an afterthought but the structural foundation of the whole thing.

Martin made this two ways in one cup. The outside layer is a peanut butter cream: just peanut butter thinned with soy milk (or vanilla soy milk, which he says works beautifully) and stirred until smooth. If your peanut butter is stiff from the fridge, warm it gently in a water bath or microwave for a few seconds.

The inside is a chocolate mousse made from hemp seeds blended with cocoa powder, soy milk, and a touch of vanilla. He sweetened his with maple syrup, though he usually reaches for date syrup. The key to getting it silky is either soaking the hemp seeds overnight or using a high-powered blender. If you try to shortcut this with a regular blender and dry seeds, you’ll end up with grit instead of mousse.

Between the peanut butter, hemp seeds, and soy milk, this dessert carried around eight to ten grams of protein. That’s a protein bar disguised as something you actually want to eat.

Martin also dropped an idea I can’t stop thinking about: swap the chocolate mousse for an espresso version. Blend hemp seeds with espresso, dates, and a little soy milk. Use that as the center, keep the peanut butter cream on the outside, and you’ve got something that belongs on a restaurant menu.

A Quick Note on Fiber

Before Martin started cooking, I brought up something I’ve been thinking about. When you puree nuts, seeds, or vegetables, a lot of people worry that you’re destroying the fiber. You’re not. Blending does what your teeth do. It breaks food into smaller pieces, but the fiber stays intact. You only lose fiber when you strain it out, like when you juice something and discard the pulp.

This matters for anyone who struggles with digestion, especially as we get older. Martin mentioned a concept from Austrian health resorts called Schonkost, a gentle cooking approach that favors steaming and pureeing over raw preparations. For people in their seventies and eighties, raw vegetables at dinner can be genuinely hard to process. Blended soups and purees deliver the same fiber and nutrients in a form the body can handle more easily.

So if you’ve been avoiding smoothies or pureed soups because you thought blending destroyed the good stuff, you can let that one go.

The Habit

If protein stacking sounds complicated, it isn’t. Start with one change. Next time you make a salad dressing, use a nut or seed base instead of plain oil and vinegar. That’s it. You’ve just added protein to a part of your meal that normally has none. From there, you can start thinking about your cooking liquids (soy milk over water), your toppings (hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds), and your desserts (blended nut or seed creams).

You’re not aiming for perfection here. You’re just recognizing that protein doesn’t have to live in one place on your plate. It can show up everywhere, doing its work in the background of every bite.

Don’t forget to get Martin’s recipes here.

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