Dried Spaghetti Portion Weight

I usually cook by eye, guessing how much I’ll need to cook, but sometimes I deliberately weigh food to see how much there is in weight.  I’ve got a pack of dried spaghetti I need to use, so I was wondering how many portions is in the whole pack.

The total weight of the pack of dried spaghetti is 500 grams – and the amount of spaghetti to cook for one person is 75-100 grams, so this one pack, which costs 20p, is good for about six portions.

• At 75 grams per portion, a 500 gram pack has 6 portions, with 50 grams leftover.
• At 100 grams per portion, a 500 gram pack has 5 portions, and it’s all used up.

That means a portion of spaghetti is just 3-4p.  This makes it an easy ingredient to use if you want to live more cheaply, whether that’s for a week-long challenge, such as the live below the line challenge, or longer term.

These are the dry weights – how much the spaghetti weighs in the packet.  Once cooked, water plumps spaghetti out and the portions on the plate will weigh about double the dry weight.

Best Way to Weigh Out Spaghetti

If you’re trying to weigh out portions of spaghetti, instead of weighing the spaghetti you’ll cook, use a digital scale and watch the total pack weight reduce as you remove spaghetti from it.

1. Place the full, opened, pack of spaghetti into a sturdy jug or bowl.
2. Turn on your digital scales and place them both onto the scales. Note how much it weighs.
3. Remove spaghetti from the packet until the weight has reduced by the amount you wish to cook (75-100 grams/person is a portion).

How much the jug/bowl or packet wrapping weigh is irrelevant as you’re looking at comparing the starting weight and the end weight.

Keeping Leftover Cooked Spaghetti

If you cook too much spaghetti, you can pack it up in an airtight box in the fridge for a few days, or freeze spaghetti.

All you need now is some bolognese sauce and that’s dinner tonight sorted!  Here’s one bolognese sauce recipe you might like to try: Bolognese Sauce