How A Soda Bottle Can Help You Measure Pasta Portions

Love it or hate it, cooking meals is a daily part of life. Whether to impress a loved one or provide for ourselves, cooking is a necessary skill that takes practice and patience. However, one of the hardest parts of throwing together dinner may not be learning knife skills or attempting to time everything accurately. Perfectly portioning out your meals is tricky, and it can feel impossible.

When it comes to pasta, we all seem to have our own tricks to measure out the right amount for two, three, or ten people. Some use the "quarter" trick. To use this technique, you connect your pointer finger and thumb, making a circle roughly the size of a quarter. Add pasta in between your fingers, and that amount is enough for a single serving (via Allrecipes).

Others utilize a food scale, weighing their pasta to the desired ounce. Typically, two ounces of cooked and one ounce of dried is the proper weight for one serving (via Taste of Home).

However, the "soda bottle trick" may be one of the fastest and easiest methods to acquire perfectly portioned pasta.

While some of the typically used methods, like the quarter trick, may vary from human error, a soda bottle opening always remains the same size.

To use this trick, simply rinse out an empty soda bottle. Then, fill the top opening with dry pasta to determine how much pasta to cook per serving. Make sure the pasta is packed in tightly, according to Taste of Home. This portioned amount is perfect for one individual.

To save space in your kitchen, if you use a liter-sized bottle, cutting the bottom half of the bottle off and keeping the top may be convenient. However, other sized soda bottles also work well. While this trick is handy, this reuse of plastic is also great for the environment by keeping one more bottle out of the landfill.

Try this trick at home and see if it measures up against your other pasta portioning techniques.