Nutrition science
Raw or cooked weight? How to weigh rice, pasta and chicken for accurate macros
· Updated · Reviewed by James, Dietitian
Weigh your food and log it in the same state it was in when you weighed it. Raw weight goes with a raw nutrition entry; cooked weight goes with a cooked one. Mix them and the numbers can be out by a factor of three — 75 g of dry rice logged against a "boiled rice" entry records a third of the calories you actually ate.
That single rule fixes most tracking errors. The rest of this guide explains why it matters, gives the conversion figures for common foods, and covers the cases where it gets awkward.
Why the weight changes but the nutrition figures don't
Cooking mostly moves water. Rice and pasta absorb it and get heavier; meat and fish lose it and get lighter. What's in the food barely changes — the same energy and protein, spread across more, or fewer, grams. (How much of it your body absorbs is a separate question, covered at the end.)
So "100 g of rice" is two very different amounts of food depending on whether it's dry or cooked. The UK's official food composition data (CoFID, the dataset behind McCance and Widdowson's) lists both:
| Food | Dry or raw, per 100 g | Cooked, per 100 g | 100 g dry or raw becomes about |
|---|---|---|---|
| White basmati rice | 351 kcal, 84 g carbs | 117 kcal, 27 g carbs (boiled) | 300 g cooked |
| Brown basmati rice | 355 kcal, 78 g carbs | 131 kcal, 29 g carbs (boiled) | 270 g cooked |
| White dried pasta | 343 kcal, 76 g carbs | 169 kcal, 37 g carbs (boiled) | 200 g cooked |
| Wholewheat spaghetti | 329 kcal, 68 g carbs | 134 kcal, 28 g carbs (boiled) | 250 g cooked |
| Couscous | 364 kcal, 79 g carbs | 178 kcal, 38 g carbs | 200 g cooked |
| Red lentils, split | 311 kcal, 26 g protein | 102 kcal, 8 g protein (boiled) | 300 g cooked |
| Chicken | 108 kcal, 22 g protein (raw) | 148 kcal, 32 g protein (grilled breast) | 70 g cooked |
| Salmon, farmed | 217 kcal, 20 g protein (raw) | 232 kcal, 25 g protein (baked) | 80 g cooked |
The last column is the one that catches people out: grains and pulses roughly double or triple, while meat and fish shrink by a fifth to a third.
Two worked examples
Rice. You weigh out 75 g of dry white basmati. That's 263 kcal and 63 g of carbohydrate, and it cooks to about 225 g.
- Log 75 g against a boiled rice entry and you record 88 kcal — a third of what you ate.
- Weigh the 225 g after cooking but log it against a dry rice entry and you record 790 kcal — three times what you ate.
Chicken. You weigh 150 g of raw chicken breast. That's about 33 g of protein, and it cooks down to roughly 105 g.
- Log 150 g against a grilled chicken entry and you record 48 g of protein — over 40% more than you ate.
The chicken error is the more dangerous of the two for anyone working to a protein target. It overstates, so a plan that looks like it hits 140 g of protein a day might really deliver closer to 100 g.
Should you weigh raw or cooked?
Either works if you're consistent. For cooking at home, raw (or dry) is usually easier and more accurate, for three reasons:
- It's what the packet and the recipe give you. Nutrition labels on dry rice, pasta and raw meat are per 100 g as sold.
- It doesn't depend on how you cooked it. Cooked weight varies with how long you boil, how much you drain, and how well done the meat is. Dry weight doesn't.
- It matches your shopping list. The 500 g of chicken on the list is the 500 g on the scales.
Weigh cooked when you don't have a choice — leftovers, a portion from a shared pot, or eating out — and use a cooked entry.
Batch cooking: the one calculation worth knowing
If you cook rice or pasta for the week, weigh it dry, then weigh the whole batch once it's cooked. Divide to get your own conversion.
Say 300 g of dry rice becomes 900 g cooked. Your 250 g serving of cooked rice is 250 ÷ 900 × 300 = 83 g of dry rice — log that against the dry entry. This is more accurate than any published factor, because it's based on your pan and your cooking time.
Tinned beans and lentils
Tinned pulses are already cooked. The weight that matters is the drained weight (it's printed on the tin), and it goes with a cooked or canned entry — not the dried one, which would roughly triple the calories.
How BiteSync handles it
BiteSync's recipes follow the same rule, so you don't have to think about it:
- Grains and pasta are listed dry, as on the packet, and costed against raw reference values. The method tells you roughly what that becomes once cooked — "Cook 95 g rice (about 285 g once cooked)".
- Meat and fish are listed raw, as you buy them.
- Tinned pulses are the drained weight and are labelled as cooked weight on the recipe, because that's the one exception.
Nutrition comes from the UK CoFID data shown above, matched ingredient by ingredient.
Quick answers
Should I weigh rice before or after cooking? Before, dry, if you can. It's what the packet's nutrition label refers to, and it doesn't change with cooking time.
Does cooking change the calories in food? Not the calories on the label. Those are based on what the food contains, and a portion gets the same figure whether you weigh it raw or cooked, provided you use the matching entry.
It does change how much of that energy your body gets out. Heat breaks down starch and protein, making them easier to digest. In a 2011 study in PNAS, mice fed cooked meat and cooked sweet potato gained more weight than mice fed the same foods raw, with no difference in how much they ate or how active they were (Carmody, Weintraub and Wrangham, 2011).
No food table or nutrition label adjusts for this — CoFID doesn't, and neither does any tracking app — so it doesn't change how you should weigh and log. It is one reason tracked calories are a good estimate rather than an exact measure. Oil you add to the pan is separate: count it on its own.
Why do two apps give different numbers for the same meal? Usually because one is using a raw entry and the other a cooked one. Check which state each entry refers to.
What about cooked chicken from a packet? That's sold cooked, so weigh it as it comes and use a cooked entry.