Rice Calculator

How to use the rice calculator

The calculator has two modes, chosen with the Calculate buttons.

• How much rice to cook. Enter the number of people and say whether rice is the main dish or a side. You get the amount of dry rice to measure, the amount of cooked rice it will yield, and the calories and macronutrients of the batch.
• Uncooked to cooked rice. Enter an amount of dry rice in grams, ounces, millilitres, fluid ounces or one of three kinds of cup. You get the cooked volume and weight and the number of servings it covers.

In the first mode a fraction of a person is dropped, so 3.5 people is treated as 3. Round up if you want a little extra.

How much rice per person

The calculator uses two standard portions. When rice is the main dish (a pilaf, a curry served over rice, a rice bowl) it allows 90 g of dry rice per person, which is half a US legal cup. When rice is a side dish it allows 60 g, about a third of a cup. Both double in weight and volume once cooked.

dry rice = people × portion (portion = 90 g for a main dish, 60 g for a side)

Example: for four people with rice as a side, 4 × 60 g = 240 g of dry rice, or about 1.32 US legal cups, which cooks to roughly 480 g or 2.64 cups. For a hungry crowd, or if you want leftovers for fried rice the next day, add a quarter more.

Rice amounts by number of people (main dish)

For a side dish, multiply any row by two thirds. If you have a kitchen scale, use the gram column: weighing is more consistent than scooping, because rice packs differently from one cup to the next.

From uncooked to cooked rice

Plain cooked rice is about twice the volume and twice the weight of the dry grain, because the kernels absorb roughly their own weight in water. The same factor of two applies across white, brown, basmati, jasmine and short-grain rice.

cooked rice ≈ 2 × dry rice (by weight or by volume)

In the conversion mode the calculator treats dry rice as weighing 0.8 g per millilitre, so a US legal cup (240 ml) is about 192 g. Example: 100 g of dry rice is 125 ml, which gives 200 g of cooked rice or about 1.04 US legal cups. One serving is counted as one cup of cooked rice, so that amount feeds about one person.

Since the water is what makes rice swell, getting the amount right matters for the texture. Use the water to rice calculator to find the right amount of water for your rice type and pot.

Which cup? Rice cooker, US legal and imperial

Three different cups are in everyday use for rice, and mixing them up is the commonest reason for a recipe going wrong.

A rice cooker cup is smaller than a standard US cup, so one US legal cup is 240 ÷ 180 = 1.33 rice cooker cups. If your cooker's water-level lines are marked in its own cups, use the rice cooker cup figures from the calculator. For other cooking conversions see the cups to ml converter and the cups to grams converter.

Calories and macronutrients

The calculator assumes a cooked main-dish serving of 180 g, which contains roughly 234 Calories, 45 g of carbohydrate and 4.5 g of protein. The assumption comes from about 130 Calories per 100 g of cooked white long-grain rice, a figure published in the USDA's FoodData Central. A side-dish serving is two thirds of that: 156 Calories, 30 g of carbohydrate and 3 g of protein.

These are estimates for plain white rice. Brown rice, oil, butter and seasoning change the numbers, and they are not dietary advice. See the disclaimer.