I've got to make Spaghetti for bout 20 people

That's kind of a vague question. Only asking about spaghetti and not mentioning what goes with it. Are you planning on having a red gravy with meatballs and some other meat like Italian sausage or going with some sort of cream sauce with seafood for protein????


Are you also planning a salad course, garlic bread to go with it etc.?

How many women, men, teenage boys and little kids are going to be present. Men and teenage boys can destroy lots of food while women and kids eat much less generally.

More info would help.

5 lbs meat
5 lbs spaghetti
1 to 1 1/2 quarts spaghetti sauce per pound of spaghetti, so 5 to 7.5 quarts of sauce

(this is for 25 servings)

Since heypaul asked about ratios:

1 lb meat per 5 servings
1 lb spaghetti per 5 servings
1-1.5 quarts sauce per lb spaghetti

Occasionally our Sunday School Class cooks Spaghetti for the Billy Brumfield Shelter for homeless men in Jackson The wife and I do the spaghetti, making enough for 80-90 men, with sides of french bread, salad and cake for dessert.

Here is our recipe ingredients intended to serve 80-90 servings with 20-30 left over, so I guess this will 120 servings.

Somewhere I did a photo post on this.


For 120 servings, we used:

10 pounds ground beef
2 #10 cans of crushed tomatoes
1 #10 can of tomato sauce
6 cans of tomato paste
6 cups onion, diced
4 cups Green Bell Pepper, diced
6 Tablespoons Lawry’s garlic salt
2 Tablespoons Black Pepper
1/2 cup Tones Italian Spaghetti Seasoning (not bad stuff)
5 Tablespoons Oregano (to supplement the Tones)
4-5 cups Parmesan Cheese
Olive oil
Salt
4 pounds of spaghetti

Directions:

Do the prep on the onions and green bell peppers

Brown off the ground beef. We used a turkey roaster and one other pan to brown the beef, then portioned it into three pans to finish the cooking.

Add the onions, black pepper, and Lawry’s Garlic salt.

Separate the beef into three pans remove the grease and add the green bell pepper.

Portion out the crushed tomatoes into the three pans.

Portion the tomato paste into the three pans

Add the Italian Spaghetti Seasoning

Reduce heat at a simmer and cook for 2 hours

Add Parmesan cheese to each pan and hold at heated stage (just at/below simmer)

Since we planned to hold the sauce for another hour or two, we made sure the temperature remained in a safe food range

In an appropriately sized pan, with salted water, we cooked the spaghetti in 2 pound batches (4 total). Since we needed to hold the spaghetti for two hours after completion, we pulled it at less than the al Denti stage.

Our intent was to hold the finished spaghetti in aluminum pans, so from here on out, everything was portioned to end up with 4 pans (held in our oven until we left for a twenty minute drive to Billy Brumfield’s).

Spaghetti is portioned into a mixing pan, then sauced until the amount of sauce looks right. Then mixed and placed into the aluminum pan.

We have sauce left over, so we portion extra over each pan of finished spaghetti

Then sealed the pans with foil and help them (At safe food serving temperature) in the oven before leaving for the homeless shelter.


All I can tell you is this works every time we do it, and after cooking most of an afternoon, I don't want to see spaghetti meat sauce for awhile.