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| Amount |
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Every weight here is raw, as-purchased weight — the number on the label at the shop, not the food on the plate.
Worked example
A complete answer at the calculator's defaults, so you can sanity-check the arithmetic without touching anything — 12 adults, 4 children, a whole bone-in bird, no leftovers wanted, green beans as the only vegetable.
Result: 18 lb bird · 8.2 kg · for 12 adults + 4 children
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Turkey, whole bone-in | 17.5 lb · 7.9 kg → buy 18 lb |
| Stuffing | 10.5 cups cooked · 4 boxes (6 oz) |
| Potatoes, raw | 7 lb · 3.2 kg |
| Gravy | 10 cups · 3 stock cartons (32 oz) |
| Green beans, raw | 3.5 lb · 5 bags (12 oz) |
| Cranberry sauce | 3.5 cups · 2 cans (14 oz) |
| Dinner rolls | 22 rolls · 2 packs of 12 |
| Pie | 16 slices · 2 nine-inch pies |
Change any input above and every figure recalculates.
Eight dishes, one plate
Every per-dish guide is written as though its dish were the star of the table. Stack eight of them and you over-buy by roughly half. This is not a hunch: Food Network gives ¾ cup of stuffing and, separately, half a pound of potatoes per person, while Whole Foods Market allows 6 oz for potatoes and stuffing combined. Those two respected sources differ by about 2.5× on the same two dishes — and neither is wrong. One is answering “how much stuffing?”; the other is answering “how much starch fits on a plate?”
The numbers above are calibrated for a standard eight-dish Thanksgiving table. The plate is a fixed size, so every extra side you add shrinks every other side. That is what the vegetable toggle is doing: three or more vegetables and the green beans drop from 115 g to 80 g a head, matching the figure in our Christmas dinner guide rather than contradicting it.
Turkey (lb) = (adults + children ÷ 2) × 1.25, halved for boneless, ×1.2 if you want leftovers
Two lines deliberately break the half-portion rule for children: rolls and pie are counted per head. A seven-year-old takes a whole roll and a whole slice of pie however little turkey they eat, and halving those is the commonest way a plan comes up short on the two things guests notice.
How big a turkey do I need for 10 people?
Plan on 12–13 lb (5.5–6 kg) of whole bone-in turkey for ten adults — 1.25 lb per person — so buy a 12 or 14 lb bird, whichever the shop has. USDA FSIS sets the floor lower at 1 lb per person, and the National Turkey Federation lower still at ¾–1 lb. Those are minimums that assume nothing is lost on the carcass; the extra quarter-pound covers carving loss and the bones you cannot eat. Worth knowing: the widely repeated “Butterball says 1.25 lb” is not Butterball — their own guidance is 1 lb.
Do children count as a full person?
For anything you serve by weight — turkey, potatoes, stuffing, beans, gravy — count each child as half an adult, so four children add two adult portions. But count them as a whole person for rolls and pie. A seven-year-old takes an entire roll and an entire slice of pie regardless of how little turkey they eat, and halving those two lines is the single most common way a Thanksgiving plan comes up short on the things guests actually notice.
Can I make all the gravy from the drippings?
No, and it is not close. A 12–14 lb bird yields roughly 2 cups of drippings, which covers about six people. This calculator budgets half a cup per person plus one extra cup for every six guests — for sixteen people that is 10 cups, or 2.4 litres. At any real gathering most of your gravy is stock; treat the drippings as flavouring rather than volume. See the gravy guide for the full working.