Need some help with portions I cooked ribs for a party yesterday. Don't know exact count of people. I cooked 8 slabs and 15 pounds of chicken legs. I have 3.5 slabs left. How do the catering company's figure portions???
these are good points, and oddly enough, I cooked ribs and chicken legs, sides of beans, potatoe salad and others brought other sides such as slaw, chips dip, etc so with all that being said, really tough to foresee whats gonna happen. That being said, after further reveiw, we had 24 adults, and 10 kids, so i way over cooked with 8slabs of st louis style spare ribs and 15lb of chicken drumsticks. gonna have lunch for a while......It really varies from company to company on what they do. There are a lot of factors that go into the planning of how much food you will need.
Here are a few:
Guest how many, male or female, age, where they are from? Men tend to eat more, teens to young adults tend to eat more, where they are from and the regions eating habits.
Menu: what is on it, how many sides, how many proteins, time of day and oddly enough the weather. If you have a lot of choices you can cut to a lower per person portion size. If it is around a normal meal eating time they will eat more. If you catch them between meals a little less. If it is very hot out people will tend to eat less heavy stuff and go for the lighter foods and the opposite when cold.
Service style: most due buffet, but if you get plated it is easy to figure. If you do buffet, are you serving them or are they serving themselves? You serving you can control how much the first serving is. If they are serving themselves they will pile the plates up. A way you can help control that is plate size. Large plate = more food taken, medium plate = less food taken. People will most of the time take what will fill the plate and end up with too much food. A 7" plate is a good size for a meal.
Hope this helps. If you are looking for numbers let me know the menu and I will fill in what I would do for it. Add some of the other details as well and it will help.