How Much Dry Pasta Do I Need???

[badjak]

I used to work on feeding 4 people out of a 500 gr pack, so 125 gr pp.
I have reduced that a lot as I am no longer a teenager
I eyeball as I don't mind left overs.

On the other hand, when making pasta by hand, I count on about 65 gr pp of fresh.
(250 gr flour, 100 gr egg (without shell), 5 portions)
Quite a difference these days

 

[ZCook]

As stated earlier, there are things being added to the pasta so the "full serving", as stated on the box, is an erroneous number in regards to the mass of food being consumed...

Forget what the box says.
Do it in reverse. What you end up with.

It's catering. No seconds. No leftovers.
It's about scaling a recipe.
You cooked a recipe.
What is one recipe?
What does it yield/weigh?
How much does a single serving weigh?
How many servings one recipe make?
How many servings do you need?
Break it down.
Scaling the recipe to fit your measured servings you'll end up with exactly what you need, no leftovers.

It's your servings per recipe that will tell you how much pasta plus other ingredients you need for the number of servings you cater not the other way around.

Since you need to know what you end up with, it's a recipe and servings per recipe exercise rather than only measuring or counting dry pasta.

And you can also calculate everything in a food app.

 

[Morning Glory]

To sum it up:
Dried elbows absorb 3x their weight in water. A serving is 56 grams, cooked. So, a cooked serving of elbow pasta would require 18 grams of dry elbows and take up (rounding up slightly) 0.4 cups of volume.

Am I reading this correctly? You are allowing 18g of dried pasta per portion? That is a very small amount. The average amount per portions I know of are:

Large 100g to 125g

Average 75g to 100g

Or for a lighter appetite 50g to 75g

Some say an average serving is a handful of dried pasta but I suppose that depends how big your hands are.

 

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

So, once again I made the GG's Mac-N-Cheese and ended up with leftover pasta, like a lot...

I took out one of my delivery cartons and found that 1/3 cup of cooked pasta fills up one of the side holders. I counted those, they're elbows, and that was 50 pieces and they weighed 46 grams. We'll call it 45 for now.

I then counted out 50 pieces of dry elbows and they weighed 15 grams.

To sum it up:
Dried elbows absorb 3x their weight in water. A serving is 56 grams, cooked. So, a cooked serving of elbow pasta would require 18 grams of dry elbows and take up (rounding up slightly) 0.4 cups of volume.

No more ziplock bags of leftover pasta!

That's why I have chickens. Like humans, they love their carbs!