Spag Bol - how much pasta?

[preponderings]

Cooking lunch. We have 1.5 L of bolognese (defrosting it, that's what got me wondering) and now iI'm cooking a 500g pack of spaghetti.
There are four of us.

How much pasta do you cook for a pasta and sauce meal? DS is 10. I assume over the next few years our consumption will have to increase...!

80g dry pasta per person, but I usually cook 100g per person because we have a hollow legged teenager.
if we have leftovers we put them in soup next day.

75g each for me, Dp and teenager and 50g for my 4 year old with 500g sauce. Yours sounds like a massive portion size.

We do a 500g pack of pasta between 4 of us - me, dh, ds1 14 and ds2 10. We wouldn't have as much sauce as that though.

... dh is 6'6" and the teenager is 6'2" with hollow legs, so BIG appetites.

We'd do 500ml sauce and 150g pasta for an adult woman and teenage boy.

My kids would eat the pasta and leave the bolognese as much as they could so I tend to do a bit more pasta - maybe 75g pasta for each of us then a spoonful of sauce of the side (for them to ignore) and maybe 3 or 4 spoonfuls mixed in for me.

So for 4 of us 300g pasta is enough.

*between us that is.

Three strands of spaghetti and one tablespoon of sauce per person seems to do everyone fine round here

Foolproof guide to cooking pasta:

1. Measure out the amount you think you need.
2. Wrong.

250g (half a packet) does DH, DD (14 months) and me for dinner, plus leftovers for lunch for DD and me. We use a 500g pack of mince.

One grain of mince and half a strand of spaghetti easily feed my family of 12, such gluttons on here, no wonder there's an obesity crisis.

Always too much here!

50g each of pasta. Meat portion is around 150g each (obvs bulked out with lots of tomato, onion, garlic and herbs)

We use about 3/4 of a 250g pack of spaghetti for 3.
Small pasta I pop it into the bowl dry to guage how much but approx the same.
About 200g mince does the sauce for one day and leftovers but we're in Italy where we eat much less sauce with our pasta.

Ok, so we need to reduce portion sizes. None of us are overweight and we are quite active. I'd expect 600g of meat to do 2 meals for the 4 of us and 2 meals for DC and me.

That does seem a lot. We have about 350 g for two adults and 2 kids and between 750-900 g of sauce. If I use 500 g of meat (adding mushrooms, onions, sauce etc) it feeds 2 adults and 2 kids and usually has an extra portion to freeze.

The whole 500g packet (for four of us) and if there's any left over - stick it in the fridge for someone to warm up later!

Portion sizes aside, spaghetti is completely the wrong pasta for a bolognese sauce. No idea why it’s become the popular choice. You need something tubey or even fusilli to hold the sauce.

I prefer more sauce to pasta hence only wanting about 50g per person of dried pasta.

As for meat again that is going to vary depending on when you put in with it.

I tend to reduce the mince to 150g for 2 people but I throw in 4 rashers of chopped bacon as I find it really changes the taste for the better and then I add in lots of mushrooms. Our portion sizes mean we feel very full after eating but the actual amount of meat and pasta is a lot less than some people use.

We have a spaghetti measure which I find is pretty accurate

Oh good, another competitive under-eating thread!

...you'd have to go a long way to beat the pizza one though, one 10" pizza apparently feeds a family of 5 in MN land

If you have a plastic pasta serving spoon the hole in the centre is dried portion measure.

This is life-changing information

Is it fresh or dried pasta? I use lots more of the fresh (reluctant to admit quite how much given the above posts) but "only" 70g of the dried.