Tracking rice - 1cup BEFORE/AFTER cooking?

get a food scale and weight it out before you cook. Don't go by volume, go by mass.

You will find that in a 1/4 cup measuring cup you will get up to 50 grams of rice, not the 45 grams most bags claim for the serving size.

It depends what the information you're using says. Is it based on dry or cooked weight? It usually says. One quarter cup of dry rice is generally 150 calories. I like to measure dry because cooked size and weight can depend on how much water it absorbs.

Dry. Someone explained here before. The companies have to put the nutritional info for the food they sell. They are not selling you cooked rice, they are selling you dry rice. So, all the measurments, grams, or whatever, on packages of for unprepaired product.

But, the amount of water absorbed varies everytime you cook it. If you are cooking for others, weight your precooked, and then post cooked again, dividing by number of servings (if you feel a need to be super exact).

It depends what the information you're using says. Is it based on dry or cooked weight? It usually says.

i find that the box almost NEVER says, and it pisses me off to to no end. are they taking about dry or cooked, frozen or thawed, raw or baked?!

AFTER.

Or go by weight.

To clarify: on the packaging, it refers to DRY.

You can measure it either cooked or uncooked, you just have to account for the calories in each one appropriately.

If you made a big pot of rice and you scoop out 1 cup of it on top of your plate, you will log it as 1 c cooked rice which should be in the range of 160-250 kcal.

If you measure out one cup or uncooked rice then that cup will be around 800 kcal and so will the finished product once it's done cooking and expanded in volume to yield roughly 4 cups.

Both cooked and uncooked rice have calories. Each grain of rice has the same amount of calories whether it is cooked or uncooked. You can log it either way. You just have to specify which one you log it as.

...it's so simple that I feel I [along with every other poster on this thread] is only making it more complicated than it even IS! O_o LOL.

Weigh it on a food scale before you cook it. I learned the hard way when I had been measuring 1/2 cup of oats for a year and logging it as 150 cals. According to the package, 1/2 cup oats weighs 40 grams, when 1/2 in my measuring cup actually weighed over 70 grams. This could apply to any food. Weigh it!

The box of Goya yellow rice I have in my hand right now doesn't specify whether it's cooked or uncooked. It just says 45 grams. OK, but 45 grams cooked is an exceptionally SMALL amount, so it must be dry, but I cooked the entire package, not just a serving, so unless I cook my serving separately from the entire box... how do I know?

If I'm cooking for my family, I weigh it before and after as needed and then divide. So, for instance, I'll measure 4 serving (and let's say the box says 1 serving = 100 calories). Then, before I serve everyone, I weigh it again and let's say it ended up being 1000g so I know that 1000g cooked = 400 calories (4*100 calories) so I measure my portion and divide accordingly - I end up calling my recipes 10 servings to make the math easy, so I made 10 servings of rice (100g each) at 40 calories per serving for 400 calories total. Hopefully that made sense. When I do the recipe, I enter it as a new recipe and put the total grams in the title (like White Rice - 1000g total)) and mark it as 10 servings, then then I can have 2 servings, or 3 servings or whatever is an appropriate serving.

After cooking....

The rice will never absorb the same amount of water twice, so there is no way to put the exact calotie count of cooked rice on the package. Weigh the rice dry, cook, then weigh again. Then divide the calories by the cooked weight to get cals/gram, and then you can determine the calories in any size portion.

So I want to track some rice, but 1 cup or uncooked rice turns into like 3 cups after cooking! So in my diary, would I track that as 1 or 3 cups? I've been wondering this for months!

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

1 cup of uncooked rice doesn't gain calories when cooked, just water, so just adjust the consumed amount as a percentage of the raw rice. You could divide the total uncooked caloric value to the cooked value and divide by weight or measurement, it's up to you.

50kgRussianBallerina wrote: »

Dry. That is the simple answer to your simple question. Don't let people confuse you with unnecessary information

Yes, weight is more accurate. But weighing food all the time is not a way I, at least, would like to live my whole life - and not necessary for the majority of people. The difference is not significant enough!

Track the uncooked rice. 1 cup dry usually makes about 4 cups cooked. 1 c uncooked rice is usually about 600 kcal.
But honestly? You can track it cooked, too. Once again, the different in calories is not really significant over the long run. 1 c cooked rice is usually about 150 kcal.

To each their own, but this concept seems a little bizarre to me when you're following a recipe. I can get saying you just want to toss together a salad or a stir-fry without measuring, but you're going to measure the rice anyway to get the right proportion of water to rice, aren't you? It's generally easier and more accurate and dirties fewer utensils to weigh the ingredients in your recipes than to portion them out based on volume.

I had a food scale in my kitchen for baking long before I ever started using to track and log my personal food intake. It's just more accurate. (Especially when I started making bread in a bread machine in warm weather, when I don't want to turn the oven on, and couldn't gauge whether the amount of flour was correct from the feel of the dough during the kneading process, since I wasn't doing the kneading.)

Before. Some people put more/less water. The weight/volume of that water will make a difference in the weight/volume of the cooked rice, but not the total calories/nutrition.

You can measure out how much raw rice you’re cooking then eat what you want save the left overs for the week and divide by how many days it takes to eat all the rice.