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Rice calories, dry and cooked

Uncooked white rice is 365 calories per 100 g. Cooked, it is 130. Rice absorbs roughly its own weight again in water, so the same grains read 2.8× apart depending on when you put them on the scale.

Cups are the problem

Rice is the food people measure by volume more than any other, and a cup of rice is two different objects before and after the pan. USDA puts a cup of raw long-grain rice at 185 g and a cup of cooked at 158 g — the cooked cup weighs less, because the grains are bigger and pack more loosely, while containing about a third of the calories.

Uncooked.

Cooked without salt.

A cup of raw rice is not a serving

185 g of dry rice is 675 calories and yields roughly three cups cooked. If you are cooking for one and reaching for a cup measure, you are making three portions. Most single servings land between 50 and 75 g dry.

The honest way to log rice you cooked in bulk

Weigh the dry rice for the whole batch, cook it, then weigh the whole cooked batch. Your serving’s share of the dry weight is its share of the cooked weight. 300 g dry becoming 900 g cooked means every 100 g on your plate carries 33 g of dry rice, or about 120 calories. This beats guessing, and it survives however much water you used.

Oats behave the same way, only more so.

Source: USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy release 2018-04. Figures are per 100 g as published; serving weights are USDA’s own. Records used: Rice, white, long-grain, regular, raw, unenriched (FDC 169756), Rice, white, long-grain, regular, cooked, unenriched, with salt (FDC 168935).

Common questions

A cup of cooked long-grain white rice is 158 g, which at 130 calories per 100 g is about 205 calories.

185 g at 365 calories per 100 g, which is about 675 calories — and yields roughly three cooked cups.

Raw is more precise because cooked weight depends on how much water it absorbed. If you only have cooked rice, weigh the whole batch and work out your share of the dry weight.

Not meaningfully. Rinsing removes surface starch and some fortification on enriched rice, but the figures here are for unenriched rice and the calorie difference is negligible.

Compare it with

All twenty-four are on the food macros index.