How Many Grams in a Cup of Quinoa?

Cups to grams: quinoa (uncooked)

Grams to cups: quinoa (uncooked)

Working with more than one ingredient? The grams in a cup chart puts 40 ingredients in one table, and the Whole Recipe Converter converts a full ingredient list in a single paste.

How to measure quinoa (uncooked) properly

Weigh it dry, then rinse. Quinoa's natural coating (saponin) tastes bitter and soapy, so it must be rinsed — but rinsing adds clinging water that inflates a cup measure. Weigh out the dry grams first, then rinse in a fine sieve and cook; the weight you measured is the weight in the pan.

Water at 1.5 times the weight. For fluffy, separate quinoa, cook it in about 1.5 times its weight of water — 255 grams of water for a 170-gram cup of quinoa — then rest it, covered, off the heat for ten minutes and fluff. Volume ratios wander; weight ratios repeat.

Expect it to triple. A cup of dry quinoa (170 grams) cooks up to roughly 3 cups of fluffy quinoa. Cooked weight varies with how much water it absorbed, which is why no honest 'cup of cooked quinoa' figure exists — plan and portion from the dry weight.

Does rinsing change how much a cup of quinoa weighs?

Quinoa seeds are tiny and round, and they pour and settle much like fine sand, levelling into a consistent cup of 170 grams when dry and uncooked. A heaped cup adds a little more, but quinoa is less sensitive to measuring technique than flaky or powdery ingredients. Rinsing changes things, though: wet, freshly rinsed quinoa carries surface water on the seeds, so it should be weighed dry, before rinsing, for the 170-gram figure to hold.

White, red and black quinoa are the same seed in different colours, with only minor differences in seed size, so a cup of any of them lands close to the same weight, and tri-colour blends behave the same way. Whether the quinoa is sold pre-rinsed or still carries its natural bitter saponin coating affects preparation, but the dry weight per cup is essentially unchanged.

Weighing matters in quinoa salads, quinoa pilaf and stuffed peppers, where the cooking liquid is measured against the grain and excess liquid leaves the seeds soggy and split. The most common mistake is measuring cooked quinoa against the uncooked conversion: 170 grams of dry quinoa makes roughly three cups once cooked, so volume and weight stop matching as soon as water is absorbed.

Frequently asked questions