Calories in Vegetable Puff

ICMR-NIN lists 1 puff at about 200 kcal among its approximate values for common snacks, with no weight and no recipe attached. A vegetable puff, or veg patties as many bakeries call it, is a square or triangle of layered pastry folded over a spiced filling. It is eaten the way fried snacks are, hot with tea, but it is baked in an oven and not fried in a kadhai, so this set lists it with rolls and noodles instead. Bakeries cut their pastry to different sizes, so the same name covers small tea-time puffs and large ones that fill the hand.

Although no oil touches it in a kadhai, a puff is rich in fat. Puff pastry is made by folding a slab of fat, usually margarine, bakery shortening or butter, into a refined-flour dough again and again, so that it bakes into dozens of thin, crisp layers. That folded-in fat does the job that frying oil does in a samosa. The filling is the lighter part: typically potato, peas, carrot and onion cooked with spices. So the energy of a vegetable puff comes mainly from the pastry, the flour and the fat layered through it, and only modestly from the vegetables.

One vegetable puff is about 9% of a sedentary man's daily energy requirement and 12% of a woman's. That is a substantial snack, although it is the lightest of the 4 rolls, noodles and puffs in this set: a plate of vegetable chowmein has 389 kcal and a paneer kathi roll 424 kcal, and both of those are meal-sized servings. It is often bought as a quick lunch, and two puffs come to about 400 kcal with little protein, fibre or vegetable to balance the pastry. As a stopgap, one puff with a fruit, a glass of chaas or a boiled egg is a better plate than two puffs.

The source gives no ingredient list for the puff, so everything said here about its make-up is general, and the 200 kcal is a rounded guide. The kind of fat matters as well as the amount: commercial puff pastry is commonly made with margarine or shortening, which are high in saturated fat. Anyone advised to limit such fats for cholesterol or a heart condition, and anyone with diabetes, should check with their doctor or dietitian.