Mung beans

One US cup of mung beans weighs 207 grams (7.3 ounces). Going the other way, 100 grams is about 0.48 cups.

Also called whole mung beans, green gram, moong, dried mung beans, dry mung beans, mung.

Dried beans, lentils and peas compared: cup weights side by side, the source behind each, and why they differ.

A cup of dry whole mung beans weighs 207 g (7.3 oz). USDA and the USDA Food Buying Guide agree within 2.7%, so this entry publishes USDA's figure. Confidence is medium because both are USDA sources.

Mung beans (Vigna radiata) are small, round, olive-green beans, a staple across South and East Asia. Whole, they are cooked into dal and soups or sprouted into the bean sprouts sold fresh in supermarkets. Hulled and split they become yellow moong dal, a different product with its own packing; this entry covers the whole green bean.

USDA SR Legacy "Mung beans, mature seeds, raw" (FDC 174256) gives 1 cup = 207 g and 1 tablespoon = 13 g, with 9% water. The USDA Food Buying Guide, a separate USDA program that measures yields for school kitchens, counts about 2 1/4 cups of dry mung beans to the pound, 202 g a cup. The two sit 2.7% apart, well inside the 10% tolerance for whole seeds. Norway's Matvaretabellen gives 80 g per decilitre (189 g a cup), but it assigns the same 80 g to most dry legumes alike, so it is not entered.

The physical check: mung beans are among the smallest dry beans, a few millimetres across and nearly round. Small round seeds fill a measuring cup more completely than large flat ones, because the cup's walls leave less wasted space around them. That puts mung beans with navy beans (208 g a cup) at the heavy end of the legumes on this site, ahead of lentils (192 g), black beans (194 g) and the large lima beans (178 g) and kidney beans (184 g). At 207 g a cup is 0.88 g/mL.

Mung beans cook faster than most dry beans: whole beans soften in under an hour without soaking, and split moong dal in less. USA Pulses gives 1/2 cup of dry beans as 1 cup cooked as a rule of thumb for all pulses. They also sprout easily; sprouts are measured fresh, not as dry beans, and their volume depends on how long they grow.

Practical guidance: use 207 g per cup of dry mung beans, 104 g per half cup and 13 g per tablespoon; a pound holds about 2 1/4 cups. Rinse and pick them over before cooking. For sprouting, weigh the dry beans, since the sprouted volume depends on how long they grow. Split yellow moong dal is not covered by this figure.