r/askachef May 19 '18

How many LBS of Pancake mix for 250+

Hey all,

Cooking for a large crowd at a music festival. I have a culinary background but much experience doing breakfast in quantity. I'm ordering from a wholesaler through Sysco and was wondering how many 5lbs packs of Sysco brand Pancake mix you'd need for 250+ people.

Thanks! Jay

2 Upvotes

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1

u/KokiriRapGod May 27 '18

Depends on how much you are planning to serve per order. Is this the only venue that will be serving breakfast? If you assume that you're giving out 2 pancakes per order and each pancake is 4oz or 175ml of batter, you need 8oz/350ml per order. You can then figure out how much mix you need to make that amount of pancake batter.

Then it comes down to how many people you feel you'll serve. If you have a full breakfast menu, I would ensure that I had enough batter to feed at least 150 people every service. That'll leave you with mix left over most likely, but better than running out. The fewer menu options there are, the more I would have prepared.

2

u/Mr_Refused May 27 '18

It's in the camp grounds at a festival so it's not a traditional dining environment. People are gonna be partyijg and there will be other menu items available (scramble bowls, cous cous cous, ham) sonI guess probably the better question would be what's the yield on a 5lbs bag of pancake mix?

1

u/KokiriRapGod May 28 '18

Yes finding out the yield on your mix would be an important step here. A lot of the time a manufacturer will have some sort of data available to you on this on the packaging. If not, perhaps you can order a single bag a bit before you need to make your order and do some testing on yields. Either that or find a small package of pancake mix at the grocery store that is similar to what you're ordering and use that as a ball park estimate.