Should you weigh food raw or cooked? Rice, pasta and meat
Rice, pasta, quinoa, chicken: they all change weight when you cook them. Here’s how to log them without mixing them up.
Short answer: either way works, as long as the tracker entry matches. Weighing raw (dry) is more accurate, so do that when you cook for yourself. When you cook for a lot of people, weigh the cooked food and pick the cooked entry. Cooking changes the weight, because grains soak up water and meat loses it. The calories stay the same.
This part continues how to count calories.
Should you weigh rice and pasta cooked or uncooked?
Rice, pasta, quinoa: how do you count them correctly?
The classic way to cook grains is to put them in liquid (water, milk) and boil them in one form or another. In water, the grains swell and get heavier. The calories don’t change, but the portion gets 2–3 times heavier.
On the whole, there are two approaches:
- weigh the dry portion: better, because it’s more accurate
- weigh the cooked rice: also fine, but less accurate
The first way suits people who cook only for themselves. Or for two, as long as the cooked food gets split in equal shares, for example in half. It’s hard to measure 1/5 of a big pot of pasta by eye, but a half or a third is much easier, and the error will be smaller.
The second way is for when you cook for many people at once, and it’s impossible or very awkward to count portions exactly. For example, you have a big family and kids.
In food trackers, cooked and raw grains come as separate foods, or as versions of one food. The main thing is to pick the right one and not mix them up. For example, 100 g (3.5 oz) of dry white rice is 365 calories, and 100 g of cooked rice is 130. Mix them up, and you get the error from how accurate is calorie counting.
white rice
- White rice, dry (uncooked) per 100 g (3.5 oz) Weighed dry? This one 365 cal
- White rice, cooked per 100 g (3.5 oz) Weighed cooked? This one 130 cal
Should you weigh meat raw or cooked?
With meat, poultry and fish, the idea is similar. A piece of meat gets lighter after cooking, because part of the water evaporates. But there are more ways to cook it than grains.
You can:
- pan-fry chicken breast
- grill it
- bake it
- sear it and then bake it
- boil it
- cook it in an air fryer
- cook it sous vide
Naturally, each of these methods gives a different weight after cooking. So the idea is the same as with grains: either log the raw weight (better), or log the weight of the cooked portion and pick the “fried chicken” or “boiled chicken” entry.
A common question: which way is “healthier”? A common (wrong) answer: frying is bad, everything else is good. In fact, the meat doesn’t care at all what you do to it, as long as the result doesn’t look like charcoal. But frying can add calories through other foods: oil, flour, breadcrumbs, eggs. And let’s be honest: plain chicken with nothing added rarely tastes good from a frying pan, and nobody fries chicken to eat something bland.
The most common mistake: cooking oil and breading
The most common counting mistake is to leave out those extra foods. 10 g (about 2 teaspoons) of oil is ~90 calories. 2 eggs: another ~140. Flour and breadcrumbs: another ~100. There’s nothing wrong with these foods, but don’t forget to count them. Otherwise only the chicken gets logged, while the real portion has a third more calories or even more, and none of them are counted. But not all the oil ends up on your plate: a lot of it stays in the pan. So don’t go crazy and overcount either. (To weigh the oil, use the package method with the scale’s tare button.)
Different cuts, different calories: chicken breast vs thigh, lean vs fatty beef
The main thing about meat: different parts differ in calories and macros. Sometimes by a lot.
For example, chicken breast, which became a meme food together with rice, really is one of the best foods when it comes to calories and macros. Let’s look at its macros next to chicken thighs with the skin. On average, cooked:
Chicken breast 
Thigh with skin | Per 100 g (3.5 oz) | Chicken breast | Thigh with skin |
|---|---|---|
| Calories | 165 | 232 |
| Protein | 31 g | 23 g |
| Fat | 3.6 g | 15 g |
| Carbs | 0 g | 0 g |
Thighs are fattier and have a bit less protein. On the whole, the difference is small, but it’s there. The smaller your daily calorie budget, the more it matters for your progress.
Another example. 93/7 and 85/15 ground beef are different foods: 150 and 215 calories per 100 g raw, with the balance shifted toward protein or toward fat. Again, a small difference, but on a 150 g (5.3 oz) portion it comes to ~100 calories. 100 calories over 3 meals is 300 calories a day: enough to eat up most of a typical deficit. And cuts of lamb with different amounts of fat can differ in calories as much as twofold.
By no means do you need to eat only breast and always pick “lean” cuts. Quite the opposite: your body needs fat. But if you systematically log thighs as breast and fatty ground beef as lean, your real calories will be higher than your log. We’ve already covered what that means for progress in how accurate is calorie counting.
Sources
- Dietary fats explained. MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine.