Dry pasta grams per cup: elbow macaroni, penne, orzo, egg noodles and more compared

A US cup of dry pasta weighs anywhere from about 38 grams for egg noodles to 191 grams for orzo, a fivefold difference for the same wheat dough. The shape decides it: how much air each piece holds inside it and how much it leaves around it. For pasta, a cup is a rough measure and the weight is the reliable one.

All weights are for a US cup of 236.5882365 ml; a tablespoon is a sixteenth of it. A range means the sources disagree by more than this site’s tolerance for that kind of ingredient, so no single figure is chosen. King Arthur’s figure is shown where this site records one, with the verdict on it. Each ingredient’s own page has every source and the full reasoning.

Dry pasta itself is dense. Biernacka and colleagues (2018) measured raw spaghetti at 1.34 to 1.45 grams per millilitre, about 1.4 times as heavy as water. What changes from shape to shape is how much of a measuring cup the pasta fills, and that runs from about half the cup to about a tenth of it.

Small, solid shapes fill it most. Orzo grains and couscous are nearly solid and pack like rice, so a cup weighs 170 to 191 grams for orzo and 173 grams for couscous; half or more of the cup is pasta.

Tubes and spirals hold air inside and around them. A cup of elbow macaroni weighs 113 to 130 grams, because short, curved pieces settle into each other's gaps; straight tubes such as penne (95 grams) and open spirals such as rotini (84 to 96 grams) leave more room, so only a quarter to a third of the cup is pasta.

Open shapes hold more air still. Medium shells are little cups that nest only partly (64 to 76 grams; use 76), and bow ties prop each other apart with their pinched centres (60 to 81 grams, depending on their size). Under a quarter of the cup is pasta.

Noodles are mostly air. Dry egg noodles are loose curls of thin ribbon, 38 grams to a loosely filled cup and up to 50 grams once they settle; fried chow mein noodles weigh 45 grams.

Most of these figures are ranges because pasta is among the hardest ingredients to measure by the cup. A shaken cup settles further, and pasta makers print a fixed 2-ounce (56 gram) serving with the cup rounded to the nearest common fraction, so the same penne is labelled 1/2, 2/3 or 3/4 cup depending on the brand. The working figures on each page come from measurements that agree with each other.

Cooked pasta is a different measurement again. It is soft and compresses, so USDA weighs a loosely filled cup of cooked elbows at 120 grams and a packed one at 132, and the USDA Food Buying Guide's school-kitchen yields work out to 150 to 220 grams a cup. Only cooked egg noodles, 160 grams a cup where USDA and Health Canada agree, are published.

For pasta, weigh. Two ounces, 56 to 57 grams, is the standard dry serving for every shape, and it is the one number that does not change with the shape.