How to measure pasta when cooking for the family

amrwills

Hi everyone. Those of you who cook pasta for your whole family, how do you weigh it? I cook all the mince in one pan and all the spaghetti in the other, so it isn’t much use to me weighing the uncooked pasta etc, just to go and put it in the pot with everyone else’s. but the calories on the spaghetti and mince are for uncooked weight.

Is there a simple solution for this?

Meghanebk

I rarely cook for other people, but when I do I eyeball the percentage of my portion of the total dish.

I'd weigh the dry pasta/mince/whatever for the whole recipe, then estimate I had 20% of each or whatever.

ruqayyahsmum

For the sauce I use recipe builder on here. I add all the ingredients on here and type in how many portions that is. I then weigh out the one portion for me ( combined weight ÷ 4 = what my portion is )

For pasta I weigh it dry then when cooked place the drained pasta in a dish I've teared. I can then do the math to work out what the equivalent dry weight is and take out my portion

deannalfisher

if you are cooking a full box of pasta - weight before cooked and after cooked, then dish out your serving size and weight it - then just figure out what percentage your serving is of the overall cooked product

deannalfisher

for example - you cook a box of pasta and its 200g uncooked; when cooked its 400g (keeping math simple); so 100g cooked pasta= 50g uncooked

you serve yourself 150g cooked pasta - so divide by 2 and your serving is 75g uncooked

srk369

deannalfisher wrote: »

for example - you cook a box of pasta and its 200g uncooked; when cooked its 400g (keeping math simple); so 100g cooked pasta= 50g uncooked

you serve yourself 150g cooked pasta - so divide by 2 and your serving is 75g uncooked

I do this if I am keeping my pasta separate, but if I'm combining everything I weight the pot to start with, add everything to the recipe builder in precooked weights, cook and then combine in the pot. I now weigh the pot at the end and subtract out the empty pot. This number is now my number of 1g servings in the recipe builder.

So if the pot was 500g and you have 4000g after combining everything, you have 3500 servings. You then weigh your meal. I did this last night with beans and served myself 350g - 350 servings! Makes leftovers easy too.

Francl27

Recipe calculator is your friend.

capaul42

Recipe builder.
Weigh all raw ingredients into recipe builder: spaghetti, sauce, meat. Cook and mix. Weigh finished dish and enter weight in grams as servings. Put plate on scale, tare, add how much pasta you want. Enter weight in grams as your serving size.
I made pasta tonight. My entire pot of pasta, less pot weight, was 1350 grams. I inputted 1350 into my recipe as the number of servings. Loaded my plate and entered the weight as the servings for my dinner, which was 245.

Camigwen

srk369 wrote: »

deannalfisher wrote: »

for example - you cook a box of pasta and its 200g uncooked; when cooked its 400g (keeping math simple); so 100g cooked pasta= 50g uncooked

you serve yourself 150g cooked pasta - so divide by 2 and your serving is 75g uncooked

I do this if I am keeping my pasta separate, but if I'm combining everything I weight the pot to start with, add everything to the recipe builder in precooked weights, cook and then combine in the pot. I now weigh the pot at the end and subtract out the empty pot. This number is now my number of 1g servings in the recipe builder.

So if the pot was 500g and you have 4000g after combining everything, you have 3500 servings. You then weigh your meal. I did this last night with beans and served myself 350g - 350 servings! Makes leftovers easy too.

I like to use this method as well but usually weigh in oz, helps keep the number of servings from making me feel like I've went overboard. I actually use this for every family meal not just pasta, so much easier to track.