Farro, Greens and Feta Bowl with Hemp Seed Dressing

What it is

Pearled farro, boiled until it's tender with a little chew left in the middle. Kale sliced into thin ribbons and massaged by hand in a dressing you make in the blender: hulled hemp seeds, lemon, garlic, parsley and a splash of cold water, blended until it pours like yogurt. Then rocket, cucumber and cherry tomatoes, crumbled feta made with non-animal rennet, and a second scatter of seeds on top for crunch. Each bowl gets 30 g of hemp seeds, half in the dressing and half on top.

Hulled hemp seeds are the soft inner seed with the crunchy shell taken off, and they come from industrial hemp, the low-THC varieties of Cannabis sativa grown for fiber and food. To answer the question everyone asks: an Italian review of the seed explains that any cannabinoid on it is contamination from the plant's resin at harvest, and in these varieties it should be extremely low. Should. A 2025 review found consumer seeds where it wasn't, so if you're drug tested for sport or work, read the plain line in the tips first.

Farro, says the Whole Grains Council, is emmer, an ancient strain of wheat, chewy and nutty. And this is Protein Champion number fourteen of twenty, the first one where the champion and the grain sit on the same side of the table. Hold that thought until the farro's boiling.

Why you should eat it

Here's the short version, before anyone calls hemp a garnish. USDA FoodData Central lists 31.6 g of protein per 100 g of hulled hemp seeds, so the 30 g in each bowl carries about 9.5 g. The card below counts the whole bowl, and the seeds bring the biggest share of its protein. Fiber is the honest surprise: that same 100 g of seeds holds only 4.0 g, because most of the seed's fiber leaves with the shell. So the farro does the fiber work, 7.3 g per 100 g dry, and it brings most of the carbs too, 72.1 g in that same 100 g. The seeds are nearly half fat, 48.8 g per 100 g, and 38.1 g of that is polyunsaturated. Nearly all the sodium and most of the saturated fat in the bowl come from the feta. And the amino acids have a twist this time, which I'll show you while the farro boils.

Tips

• The bite test beats the clock. Bob's Red Mill gives its farro about 30 minutes and the Whole Grains Council 25 to 40, but neither says pearled, so start biting at 20. Your bag has the final word.
• No salt in the farro water, on purpose. USDA lists 1,140 mg of sodium per 100 g of feta, so taste at the end before you reach for the salt.
• Cooking ahead for the training week? The Whole Grains Council says farro's firm texture holds up to acidic dressings. Keep the feta and the topping seeds in their own little pots until you eat, so the seeds stay crunchy, and mind the two-day limit in Storage.
• If you react to nuts or seeds, check with your doctor before trying hemp. A 2025 review names hemp seed proteins, edestin among them, as possible allergy triggers and notes reported cross-reactions with other seeds and nuts.
• If you're drug tested for sport or work, talk to your testing body before you eat hemp seeds. A 2025 review reports THC in some consumer hemp seeds above legal limits, by up to 1,250%, and a small 2026 study found low-level cannabinoid results in urine after people ate hemp seed products. I've read only that second study's summary.
• New to hemp and worried about your gut? In case four, six people had mild wind and tummy discomfort in the first two weeks of 50 g of hemp protein a day, and it passed. This bowl holds far less, and going slow is allowed.

Substitutions

• Pearled farro: Whole farro The Whole Grains Council says to skip 'pearled' and look for the words 'whole farro' if you want the whole grain. Its chart gives farro 25 to 40 minutes, so expect a longer boil and lean on the bite test. USDA has no whole-farro record, so the nutrition card, built on pearled farro, won't match.
• Pearled farro: Quinoa, cooked to the packet, for a bowl without wheat Farro is a wheat, so it contains gluten: the Whole Grains Council lists farro and emmer among the wheats. The card is built on farro, so it won't match.
• Feta: Cooked chickpeas, drained (about 1 tin), instead of or alongside the feta Chickpea protein carries 6.69 g of lysine per 100 g of protein (USDA FoodData Central 173757), so the bowl keeps a lysine partner without any cheese. Not tested on this plate, and the card is built on feta, so it won't match.
• Kale: Baby spinach Softer and milder, and it needs no massage: toss it with the dressing at the end. The card is built on kale.

Storage

Cool it and get it into the fridge within one to two hours, at 0 to 5 °C, and eat leftovers within 48 hours: that's the Food Standards Agency's rule for cooked food. Making it ahead? Keep the feta and the topping seeds apart until you eat. And once the bag of hemp seeds is open, it lives in the fridge too (Manitoba Harvest).

While it cooks: the champion that plays for the grain team

Farro boiling, kale massaged, twelve minutes with nothing to do. Pull up a chair.

Quick refresher. Protein is a chain of amino acids, and nine of them have to come from food. Two keep showing up in this series: lysine, and the sulfur pair, methionine and cysteine. Grains run light on lysine and beans a touch light on the sulfur pair, which is why arroz com feijão works so well, as Champion number one showed.

Hemp seed protein carries all the essential amino acids, so the word 'incomplete' can sit down. The interesting part is the mix. In USDA FoodData Central's records, lysine makes up 4.05 g of every 100 g of hulled hemp seed protein, and the sulfur pair 5.08 g. Cooked white rice: 3.61 g and 4.39 g. So hemp sits on rice's side of the table, not the beans'. Of every food I checked for this piece, it has the biggest sulfur share.

And the farro? Same side. USDA has no amino acid values for farro, so I looked at its wheat relatives: spelt carries 2.80 g of lysine per 100 g of protein and durum wheat 2.21, both heavier on the sulfur pair. The grain agrees with the champion. Nobody brought the lysine.

Except the feta, at 8.59 g of lysine per 100 g of protein, more than twice hemp's share. By my arithmetic, the hemp, farro and kale in this pot come to 3.63 g of lysine per 100 g of protein, and the feta lifts the bowl to 4.74.

Here's the picture I'd draw on the board: a jigsaw. Hemp and farro are two pieces with the same bump on the same edge, so they won't click, however hard you push. The feta is the piece with the notch.

The picture stops in two places. Jigsaw pieces have to touch, and your protein doesn't: Mariotti and Gardner, the review behind Champion number one, found no evidence yet that plant proteins need a partner in the same meal, and a reasonable variety over the day looks fine. And these shares are counted in the food, before digestion. Case two gives one glimpse from people: blood lysine came in lower after hemp than after beef (as it did after the fava bean and buckwheat meals), while methionine kept up.

No cheese in the house? Chickpeas carry 6.69 g of lysine per 100 g of protein, and they're in the swaps.

So, in one line: hemp brings the sulfur pair, the grain agrees with it, and the feta brings the lysine they both run light on.

Case one: what's actually inside a hemp seed

Four researchers at Tuscia University in Viterbo, Italy, gathered what was known about the industrial hemp seed up to 2020: what's in it, how good its protein is, where its fiber sits, and the few studies where people ate it.

The protein carries all the essential amino acids, and most of it is one storage protein, edestin, about 82% in two of the studies they cite. Scored against the strictest yardstick, the needs of children aged 2 to 5, lysine fell short in all three reports they list (0.75, 0.72 and 0.62 of the target), and in the two on commercial protein isolates the sulfur pair fell shorter still. Against the patterns for older children and adults, one analysis found nothing short at all. On digestibility, a rat test put hemp protein in the range of pulses like lentils and above cereal grains, and taking the shell off raised it from 85.2% to 94.9%.

The fiber sits mostly in the shell, so hulled seeds carry much less: the whole-seed analyses they cite found 27.6 and 33.8 g per 100 g.

And people? As of 2020, a lack of studies on eating whole hemp seed, and a few rather inconclusive trials with hemp oil.

For your plate: hulled seeds are the better-digested form, at least in rats, and lysine is hemp's lighter amino acid, short only against the young-child yardstick. The feta adds more of it here.

Where it stops: no search method is described, so the authors chose the evidence themselves, and the digestibility numbers come from a rat study I haven't opened myself. No external funding, no conflicts declared. A good map of the seed, with a big blank where the people should be.

Case two: hemp bread against a beef steak

Ten healthy adults in Aberdeen, Scotland, none of them vegetarian: three men and seven women, average age 42. On six days, at least two weeks apart, each ate a meal carrying 30 g of protein from one source: bread rolls made with hemp flour or one of four other plant flours, or a fried lean beef steak, every meal with wheat bread and 30 g of butter. The order was fixed, with hemp last. Then came five hours of blood samples and an all-you-want pasta lunch.

The amino acids are the part I love. The hemp meal held the least lysine of all six, and blood lysine after it came in lower than after beef. Methionine went the other way: lower after every plant meal except hemp, which matched beef even though people ate less of it. Lysine came in lower after the fava bean and buckwheat meals too, so I read it as a hint, not proof, that the food's pattern reaches the blood.

GLP-1, a gut hormone tied to feeling full, ran higher after hemp than after the fava bean and buckwheat meals, and ghrelin, the hunger one, ran lowest after hemp. The hunger ratings didn't follow, though, and nobody ate less pasta after any meal.

For your plate: hemp's lighter lysine may show up after the meal, and on this plate the feta adds lysine to the food by the USDA numbers; nobody has tested what that does in the blood.

Where it stops: ten people, a fixed order, and meals matched on protein only, so the hemp meal also carried the most fat and fiber. People ate about 70% of the hemp meal against 93.5% of the steak (the analysis adjusted for it). It was hemp flour baked with wheat, at three times the hemp protein in this bowl. The Scottish Government paid for it, and the authors declare no conflicts. A real glimpse, through a very small window.

Case three: a hemp smoothie and your blood sugar

Two experiments at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, with healthy, lean adults aged 18 to 45, men and women about evenly: 27 finished the first and 16 the second. After a 12-hour fast, one morning a week, they drank a fruit smoothie, every version with the same energy and volume: 40 g or 20 g of hemp protein, 40 g or 20 g of soy protein, or a control that was almost all carbohydrate. The hemp was a protein concentrate powder. An hour later came pizza.

Before the pizza, every protein smoothie gave a gentler blood sugar rise than the control, and the 40 g cups the gentlest: in the first experiment, hemp's rise was a quarter of the control's (33.27 against 133.86). Hemp and soy were never different from each other. After the pizza, though, the 40 g cups were followed by a bigger rise than the control; across the whole morning they still came out lower. In the first experiment, where the pizza was all-you-want, intake came out the same after every cup (p = 0.43), and over the morning the 40 g hemp cup was followed by higher appetite ratings than the control, not lower. The second experiment found no appetite difference.

For your plate: protein in place of sugar gave a softer rise, just as soy did. It didn't change how much pizza people ate.

Where it stops: part of that softer rise is simply less sugar in the cup (28.7 g of carbohydrate in the 40 g hemp smoothie, 90.3 g in the control). Young, lean people, a powder rather than seeds, and this bowl holds under half the smaller dose. I read the accepted manuscript, whose participant counts don't quite match its flow charts. Hemp companies, Manitoba Harvest among them, part-funded it with matching government money and, the paper says, had no role in the analysis. If you manage your blood sugar, talk to your doctor before you build meals around this.

Case four: six weeks of hemp protein and blood pressure

Back in Winnipeg, 35 adults with mild high blood pressure signed up and 31 finished: 19 men and 12 women, average age 61, 11 of them on steady blood pressure medication. On top of their usual food, each drank two smoothies a day carrying 50 g of protein, for three six-week rounds with two-week breaks between: casein (a milk protein), hemp protein concentrate, or hemp protein with 5 g swapped for lab-made hemp peptides. Neither they nor the researchers knew which was which, and a cuff they wore tracked blood pressure over 24 hours.

After the hemp rounds, 24-hour blood pressure averaged 133.5 over 78.9, against 137.0 over 81.8 after casein: 3.5 points lower on the top number and 2.9 on the bottom. The peptide version went further, 8.9 and 5.8 points below casein. Two blood markers of blood pressure control, ACE activity and renin, also came in lower after hemp. Six people had mild wind and tummy discomfort in the first two weeks, and it passed.

For your plate: a lead worth knowing about, not a promise for this bowl.

Where it stops: some of that gap is casein rising, not hemp falling. From the paper's own starting average of 135.1, I worked out that hemp ended 1.6 points lower and casein 1.9 higher. It was a powder, 50 g a day, five times this bowl, with no food records kept, and the conclusion says renin rose while the table says it fell. The Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada funded it, Manitoba Harvest supplied the powder, and the authors report no conflicts. If you're managing blood pressure, take this to your doctor. A recipe can't make that call for you.