Nutritive proteins are provided herein. Also provided are various other embodiments including nucleic acids encoding the proteins, recombinant microorganisms that make the proteins, vectors for expressing the proteins, methods of making the proteins using recombinant microorganisms, compositions that comprise the proteins, and methods of using the proteins. Nutritive proteins include engineered proteins, wherein the engineered proteins comprise a sequence of at least 20 amino acids that comprise an altered amino acid sequence compared to the amino acid sequence of a reference secreted protein and a ratio of essential amino acids to total amino acids present in the engineered protein higher than the ratio of essential amino acids to total amino acids present in the reference secreted protein. In some embodiments, the engineered protein comprises at least one essential amino acid residue substitution of a non-essential amino acid residue in the reference secreted protein.