Raw weight
Raw weight is the weight of an ingredient before cooking; because cooking mainly changes water content rather than energy, raw weight is the more stable basis for calculating calories.
A hundred grams of raw rice becomes roughly 250 to 300 grams of cooked rice, and the calories barely change. Water went in; energy did not. That single fact is behind most of the confusion about whether to weigh food before or after cooking.
Why raw is usually the better basis
Raw weight is reproducible. Cooked weight depends on how long you cooked it, how much water you added, how much evaporated, and whether it sat covered. Two cooks making the same dal from the same lentils can finish with cooked weights differing by a third.
Composition tables also list most ingredients raw, so raw weight lets you use the value directly rather than hunting for a cooked entry.
When cooked weight is fine
When the database entry is explicitly for the cooked food, and when the cooking method is standard — boiled rice, boiled pasta, a plain roasted chicken breast. Just never mix the two: weighing cooked food and logging it against a raw entry is a large error in the direction of under-counting.
The thing raw weight cannot capture
Anything added during cooking. Oil, ghee, butter, cream and sugar all have to be logged separately, and in home cooking they are usually the biggest single line in the calculation.
Sources
- 1.Food energy: methods of analysis and conversion factors — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
- 2.FoodData Central — USDA Agricultural Research Service
Related reading
- How to calculate the calories in a recipe you cooked
A worked example from a real pot of dal: count the raw ingredients, add the fat, divide by real servings, save the number. Fifteen minutes once per recipe.
- Should you weigh food raw or cooked?
Raw weight is reproducible and matches most database entries. Cooked weight is what you can actually measure. The conversion factors and when each one is right.
- Does cooking change the calories in your food?
Cooking does not destroy calories, but it changes weight, digestibility and how much energy you absorb. What shifts, by how much, and what it means for logging.
- IFCT or USDA: which numbers should you trust?
Two national food composition tables, built for two food supplies. When each one is right, why they disagree about the same food, and what to do about it.