Advanced options
Fresh pasta portions run ~40% heavier (125g/person for a main) since it already contains water. The spaghetti-measuring hack: a 90g portion is a bunch about the diameter of a pound coin plus a bit. Save a mug of starchy water before draining: it's the sauce-binding ingredient recipes mean by "loosen with pasta water".
What The Pasta Portion Calculator Works Out
- Dried pasta: people x grams per person. The boring, correct answer is 75g to 100g of dried pasta per person for a main with 90g the workable centre, 60g for a starter and 110g for a hungry household. Dried pasta is the ingredient the eye misjudges most reliably in the whole cupboard.
- Cooking water: a litre per 100g gives the room to move that stops the starch-glue clump. Put no oil in the water: it coats the pasta against the very sauce adhesion the next step depends on.
- Salt: 10g per litre, 1% of the water. It sounds alarming and finishes mild because most of it drains away; what remains is the difference between pasta that tastes of something and pasta that tastes of sauce on blotting paper.
- Pasta type (advanced): fresh pasta, already hydrated, wants about 40% more by weight (125g a head for a main); filled shapes serve lighter still, their richness doing the work. Both gain less weight in cooking than dried.
- Children (advanced): half portions, which also halves their share of the water, salt and sauce.
- Water and salt per 100g (advanced): override the litre and the 10g for a smaller pan or a lighter hand.
- Sauce and cheese (advanced): about 125ml of sauce per adult portion (a 400g tin of tomatoes makes roughly 350ml) and 10g of grated cheese each. Finish the pasta for its last minute in the sauce with a splash of the reserved starchy water: the emulsion this builds is what restaurant pasta has and drained-and-topped pasta lacks.
- Measuring without scales (advanced): a 90g bundle of dried spaghetti is about the diameter of a pound coin (2.3cm) and scales with the square root of the weight; a 300ml mug holds about 80g of penne; a dried lasagne sheet weighs about 18g.
- Packets and cost (advanced): 500g bags for dried (one serves five mains, not the three it usually meets) and 300g packs for fresh, costed at your price per kg. Dried pasta is among the cheapest calories in the shop, so the portion arithmetic matters mostly in the other direction. Start tasting a minute before the packet time; cooked pasta holds a day or two in the fridge and revives in the pan better than the microwave.