How Many Grams in a Cup of Rice (Long-Grain, Uncooked)?

Cups to grams: long-grain rice (uncooked)

Grams to cups: long-grain rice (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 long-grain rice (uncooked) properly

Weigh it dry, before rinsing. Rinsing adds surface water and soaking adds more, so the time to weigh rice is straight from the bag. 185 grams of dry long-grain rice, cooked by absorption, serves about four as a side — and weighed dry, it does so every time.

Work the water ratio by weight. For long-grain rice cooked by absorption, about 1.5 times the rice's weight in water is the reliable starting point — roughly 278 grams of water for a 185-gram cup of rice. Volume ratios drift with the variety; weight ratios do not.

Beware the rice-cooker cup. The plastic cup bundled with rice cookers is a Japanese gō of 180 ml, not a 236.6 ml US cup — it holds about 140 grams of rice. Half the world's “my rice ratio failed” stories are this one mismatch, and weighing both rice and water ends it.

What makes one cup of long-grain rice heavier than another?

Dry long-grain rice flows and settles much like coarse sand. Spooned or poured into the cup and levelled, it weighs 185 grams uncooked. Letting the grains settle by shaking the cup packs them a little tighter, and a heaped measure adds a further margin on top. Because rice is almost always cooked with a measured amount of water, those small differences in the cup carry straight into the finished dish.

Long-grain varieties are not identical. Basmati grains are longer and more slender and sit in the cup slightly differently from standard long-grain rice; converted or parboiled rice has firmer, less fragile grains; and brown long-grain rice still carries its bran layer. These differences are small but real, and the 185-gram figure is the reliable working value for uncooked long-grain rice.

Weight matters wherever rice and liquid are balanced: pilaf, biryani and fried rice made from freshly cooked rice all depend on the rice-to-water ratio holding steady from batch to batch. The most common mistake is measuring rice for that ratio with a heaped, unsettled cup, then blaming the cooking method when the result comes out wet or dry.

Frequently asked questions