If it’s your first Thanksgiving, how long to cook a turkey, where to put the stuffing and how exactly green bean casserole comes into existence — all may be mysteries you don’t want to use up a lifeline calling a more experienced family member to resolve.
How long to cook a turkey is, for most Thanksgiving noobs, a question that arises when it’s time to put the turkey in the oven and you realize, “well, sheet, I ain’t never cooked a turkey before!” After you realize you’ve no vessel large enough to fit a turkey within, the oven is uncomfortably small for the strange beast and decry America for not just replacing the tradition with rotisserie chicken already, it’s turkey time.
But luckily, how long to cook a turkey is a basic formula and eminently unscrewupable. (Unless you are bad at math and cooking, but then stop hosting Thanksgiving.)
Butterball’s Twitter and the Butterball turkey talk line have been dropping assists on Thanksgiving revelers for years, and their account can reveal turkey nuance in the event you have another specific question. Otherwise, the how long to cook a turkey in pounds per hour breaks down like this for a stuffed turkey:
- 6 to 8 pounds, 3 to 3-1/2 hours
- 8 to 12 pounds, 3-1/2 to 4-1/2 hours
- 12 to 16 pounds, 4-1/2 to 5-1/2 hours
- 16 to 20 pounds, 5-1/2 to 6 hours
- 20 to 24 pounds, 6 to 6-1/2 hours
Unstuffed, it’s slightly shorter when it comes to how long to cook a turkey:
- 6 to 8 pounds, 2-1/2 to 3 hours
- 8 to 12 pounds, 3 to 4 hours
- 12 to 16 pounds, 4 to 5 hours
- 16 to 20 pounds, 5 to 5-1/2 hours
- 20 to 24 pounds, 5-1/2 to 6 hours
So, you got so caught up in figuring out how long to cook a turkey that the stuffing was an afterthought? Never fear, as BuzzFeed has a stuffing hack for Thanksgiving noobs involving two Subway BMTs and a bit of kitchen ingenuity.
Got that? Good. Now that you’ve figured out how long to cook a turkey and how to magic up awesome stuffing, here’s a Alice’s Restaurant to complete your Happy Thanksgiving!
