Should you weigh rice, pasta or chicken raw or cooked? Either works, but the two weights are very different: 100 g of dry rice becomes roughly 250 to 300 g once cooked, with the same calories.
Pick a food, say whether it was dry or cooked on the scale, and see the calories and what a mix-up would cost. Includes a simple batch method and what to look for in a kitchen scale.
Put 100 g of dry rice in a pan and you end up with around 250–300 g of cooked rice. Nothing was added except water, which has no calories. So the rice did not become "lighter in energy". The same energy is now spread over a heavier pile.
That is the whole puzzle behind the question beginners ask when they start weighing food: should I weigh it raw or cooked? Both are fine. What goes wrong is mixing them up, for example weighing cooked rice and then logging it against the entry for dry rice.
Cooking moves water in or out. Rice, pasta and lentils soak it up, so a gram of the cooked food holds fewer calories than a gram of the dry food. Meat and fish lose water (and some fat) as they cook, so a gram of cooked chicken holds more calories than a gram of raw chicken. Foods like boiled potatoes barely change.
The approximate values below come from the USDA FoodData Central database, per 100 g:
| Food | Dry / raw | Cooked |
|---|---|---|
| White rice | about 365 kcal | about 130 kcal |
| Spaghetti | about 371 kcal | about 158 kcal |
| Lentils | about 352 kcal | about 116 kcal |
| Chicken breast, skinless | about 120 kcal | about 165 kcal |
These are averages. How long you boil the pasta, how much water the rice takes up or how hot the pan is all shift the result, and brands differ, so treat any single figure as an estimate that can be 10% or more out.
Weigh it either way, but log it against the entry that matches the state it was in on the scale.
Weigh dry or raw when you can. Pack labels on dry foods usually show dry values, a dry weight does not depend on how long you boiled anything, and there is nothing to convert. The same goes for raw meat and fish.
Cooking a batch? Weigh the whole pot. Weigh the empty pot, cook with a known dry weight, weigh the pot again, and subtract. Divide the total energy (dry weight × the label figure ÷ 100) by the cooked grams to get kcal per gram for your batch. Then weigh your portion and multiply.
Read the entry name. Food databases and apps usually list "rice, cooked" and "rice, dry" separately. If you cannot tell which one an entry is, pick another one.
For a 75 g dry portion of rice it is the gap between about 270 kcal and about 100 kcal, so yes, it can matter if you are tracking. But this is not about being exact: calorie numbers on labels and in databases are estimates anyway. Counting is also not for everyone. If it makes you anxious, or you have had an eating disorder, skip the scale and talk to a doctor or dietitian about other ways to eat well.
As always, this is general information, not medical advice. If you have a condition, are pregnant or breastfeeding, or take medication (especially for diabetes or blood pressure), check with a doctor or dietitian before changing how you eat.
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A basic digital scale with a tare function, enough for weighing dry rice or pasta and a portion of cooked food. A low-cost way to start weighing.
Reads in 1 g steps and has the capacity to weigh a full pot of cooked rice or lentils for the batch method.
Reads in 1 g steps with room for a big pot. It costs more mainly for the design; it does the same weighing job as the cheaper scales.
