John Myers
Most people would probably subscribe to the answer as follows: “Worrying is like noodles: you always make too much of it.” Noodles are popular and are used regularly in the kitchen. But how much pasta should you plan per person? We’ll tell you.
The perfect amount of pasta
Depending on the hunger and eating habits of the participants, you should of course individualize the perfect amount of pasta.
The gait is crucial
First, you should decide what you want to cook. If you use the noodles as a soup ingredient, for example for a delicious bean soup, 30g of cooked noodles is enough for 180ml of broth. If you serve the noodles as an accompaniment to fish and meat or as a starter of a menu, you should calculate about 70g of dry noodles per person. With fresh noodles, the weight and thus the weight specification increases to 150g. Basically, you can use this rule of thumb as a guide: Dried pasta doubles its weight when it is cooked.
If noodles are your main course, you should toss about 100 to 125g of dried noodles per person into the boiling pot. If you made the pasta from durum wheat semolina yourself, the weight of the fresh pasta per person increases to 190g. These then come to around 250g after cooking.
Tip: For a pasta salad, you can use the guide value of 100g dry pasta per person as a guide.
Note The richer the sauce or side dish, the smaller the amount of pasta can be.
Do children eat with you?
With children, you do not need to plan a full adult portion. A child’s portion can be easily estimated by hand. Accordingly, smaller children fit less in the hands than larger children. In general, you can measure a child’s portion of pasta with the child’s bowl-shaped hands. Otherwise, estimation is the order of the day: subtract a certain number of grams from an adult portion, depending on age, size and your experience with the child’s eating habits.
Special case spaghetti
Spaghetti is the Germans’ favorite pasta. It also has a decisive advantage when it comes to portioning: no scales are required. Use a scoop to find out how much spaghetti you should cook per person. Exactly one bundle should fit through the hole in the spaghetti spoon, giving you the perfect amount of pasta per person. There are also scoops that allow you to measure up to four adult portions at a time. If you don’t have one at hand, you can also use the weight specification for pasta as a guide.
Note: With whole grain pasta you generally need smaller quantities, as the pasta is more filling.
Cook pasta properly
On average, every German eats around 8 kilos of pasta per year. When cooking the noodles, the existing gut feeling or experience in the kitchen is often used. You can use this rule of thumb as a guide so that nothing goes wrong at the next pasta dinner.
Water for pasta
Basically, you use 1 liter of water for 100g of pasta. The pot should be large enough for the pasta to float freely. The pot should also be of a certain height since the existing water has to boil and starts bubbling.
Salt pasta water?
The salting of the pasta water has taste reasons. This balances the salt content of water and pasta. This preserves the flavor of the noodle. You should only add salt to the water when it is boiling. For 1 liter of water, you need 10g of salt. This corresponds to exactly one teaspoon of salt per liter of water.
Tip: Use the 10-100-1000 rule (10g salt, 100g pasta, 1000ml water) when cooking pasta.
Deter noodles
An often-controversial topic is quenching pasta. When cooking, a starch film forms to which sauces adhere particularly well. Frightening the noodles will rinse them off. Quenching is therefore only recommended when preparing cold dishes such as pasta salad. To prevent clumping, you should add the drained pasta directly to the sauce or pesto. Another option would be to pour the remaining cooking water over the pasta again.
