Which Rice Is The Best Value Cooked?

Measuring rice to serve with a meal can sometimes feel like you need a degree in math to calculate portions, especially when you are trying to measure with uncooked rice. When you consider different types of rice and expand to different sizes, things can get even more tricky.

Thankfully, I have done the math – and eaten all the rice. To save you time and headache.

How Much Cooked Rice 1 Cup Dry Yields

1 cup of cooked rice serves 2 people

The cooked ratio can vary greatly depending on which grain you cook, which is why you may sometimes have more rice on your hands than expected, or occasionally be scraping the barrel, wondering where the rice has gone!

That said, different yields inevitably mean that different rice packs will offer more food, depending on the grain. We can dive a little deeper to find out…

Which Rice Offers The Best Value For Money?

For those two steps ahead of me, you will soon realize that some bags of rice can offer false value for money, and other bags of rice – which may seem more expensive, will produce much more food.

To get to the bottom of this, I have done some math to figure out how much a cup of cooked rice cooks for each type of rice.

To keep things fair and easy, I have used the lowest cost of each type of rice, most items falling under Walmarts “Great Value” line.

(Full workings and links to products used at the bottom of the page)

The results are pretty surprising. Brown, Long Grain, and Parboiled rice offer the best value when buying dry. However, when taking into account the yield of cooked rice, the long grain falls far behind in the VFM (Value for money) category.

This echoes the point. Especially with uncooked food, we should consider the amount of food we can get out of a pack. Not just the pack size.

The same can be said with foods such as pasta and beans, which all require hydration and a level of the foods changing form once cooked.

The best news is brown rice – One of the healthier grains – and gluten-free, is still the most cost-effective on the list, doubled with Parboiled rice.

For those interested, I have my entire workings with links to the products I have used at the bottom of this page.

Does Rice Double In Size?

Now we have finished with the math. We can move on to science.

You wouldn’t be amiss to ask how much rice expands by. Is that the raw grain soaks up the water?

If that were the case, there would be one glaring hole in this answer:

If we add water and rice at a 1:1 ratio, all cooked rice should yield 2 cups cooked to one cooked raw.

Let’s take white Jasmine rice as an example: When 1 cup of dry rice + 1 cup of water = 3 cups of rice, something else must be happening, aside the soaking of water.

This is true for all grains. No grain cooked volume is equal to the non-cooked, plus water.

The magic behind rice expanding to a mass greater than the raw grain plus the water it absorbs is due to a process called gelatinization.

Gelatinization is the rupturing of cells once the water has been absorbed and heat applied. The best visualization I can apply to this is to imagine kernel corns before and after heating.

We all know popcorn seemingly explodes once heated up, generating a mass much more than the original kernel. This is a similar process (although not identical) to the tiny starch granules inside a grain of rice. Creating a mass equal to more than the raw rice plus the water.

As to why different grains swell to different masses, this is down to the make-up of each type of grain being different – Some have more starch granules, some have less, and some grains start with a larger mass. For instance, a grain of raw Basmati rice is bigger than a grain of sushi rice.

Take Aways

Rice does more than soak up water. When heated, rice goes through a gelatinization process, similar to popcorn “popping.”

Different grains expand to differing sizes, meaning one pack of raw rice will yield vastly different amounts of cooked rice.

Brown and Parboiled rice both expand the most of all of the grains, meaning the cost per bowl of cooked rice is much lower (by about 30%) than other grains of rice.

Workings Behind Rice Value For Money

For those with a particular interest in costing out portions, below are the following number I have used to work out the price per cooked cup of rice.

These numbers were true at the time of publishing. As with any food item, prices are subject to availability, seasonality, and logistics.