It’s almost Thanksgiving, and while you have your hand stuck up a turkey’s butt, you may ask yourself, how much of this stuff would I need to fill my whole house? OK, maybe you’ve never thought about that, but if you start drinking a lot more, you may think about it. And if you do, there’s not a handy little calculator to help you figure it out. The number crunchers at Movoto did the leg work to try and answer this question for us. And they even broke down the details along with some examples below
Stuff Your House Like A Turkey Calculator By Movoto Real Estate
Thanksgiving is the perfect time for overeating, food comas, and scarfing on dishes we won’t even think about for the rest of the year. There’s turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and that ever-important dish, my personal favorite, the stuffing.
So when working on the Movoto Real Estate Blog allowed me to figure out how much stuffing it would take to fill a whole house, I was all over that like marshmallows on sweet potatoes.
After some mouth-watering math and research, I determined that 369,075 pounds of stuffing would be enough to fill a house.
How did I do that? We’ll get to that later. For now, it’s time for a little history lesson, and don’t worry, it’s a tasty one.
Just What Is This Stuffing Stuff?
Stuffing A House With stuffing
Believe it or not, this dish didn’t actually originate with the pilgrims and the Native Americans. In fact, there may not have been stuffing at the first Thanksgiving at all.
Stuffing as a means of making tasty food goes back way farther than that, all the way to the ancient Romans. A cookbook we have from that time has recipes for several stuffed meats, including stuffed dormouse, so we’ve definitely come a long way to get to our modern Thanksgiving stuffing.
So not only is this stuff frickin delicious, it’s kind of a classic, and definitely not going anywhere anytime soon.
What I Needed To Know
Given that stuffing is all sorts of important to Thanksgiving, Americans, and apparently even ancient Romans, it makes sense that I’d want to know how to fill the average house with it. Well… maybe it sorta makes sense. Okay, so not at all, but there were still some things I needed to know:
What kind of stuffing should we use?
How much does stuffing weigh per cubic foot?
How many cubic feet are in a house?
How long would it take to cook all that delicious stuffing?
But what type of stuffing was I to use? With all the variations of it, we needed to find something standard and measurable, and that meant turning to the end-all of store bought stuffings.
It’s Just Not Thanksgiving Without…
Stove Top Stuffing first came on the scene in the early ’70s, thanks to Ruth Miriam Siems, but since then it’s been a pretty normal part of many Thanksgiving dinners. As the most popular store-bought brand in the states, Stove Top sells 60 million boxes every year around the giving season.
Since I needed to find something that would be standard in volume (unlike my own sourdough stuffing, which varies a little each year but is always awesome) this brand seemed like the best option.
An average box of the well-known Stove Top Stuffing was, by the numbers:
6 ounces
168 grams (0.37 pounds)
3 cups (prepared)
Using the fact that one cubic foot equals 119.7 cups I was able to determine that a cubic foot was made up of 39.9 boxes of Stove Top stuffing, or 14.76 pounds (which might still not be enough to feed my family on this feast of a holiday). Now it was just about what sort of house I’d be using.
What’s The Volume Of This Turkey?
Okay, so it’s not a turkey, it’s a house, but we’d still be stuffing it.
Finding the volume of a house is something we’ve done here on the blog a few times before, and I did it the same way this time. I used our previously found average size of a house: 2,500 square feet. I then assumed the house was 10 feet high. This gave the measurements as 50 feet by 50 feet by 10 feet, or about 25,000 cubic feet.
While this isn’t completely perfect, considering that stuffing could probably get into ventilation, insulation, and drainage without much effort, this estimate was enough to give me a basic idea.
Stuffing It In There
Now I had all the components I needed to figure out this unlikely scenario. Using my knowledge of how many boxes would be used in just one cubic foot, I was able to determine that 997,500 boxes would be enough to fill the sample house.
That also meant that our house would be full of:
167,580,000 grams
369,075 pounds
2,992,500 cups of delicious stuffing
Okay, maybe that would be enough to feed my family.
Given that this particular brand of stuffing isn’t cooked inside the bird, just inside a pot on the stove or container in the microwave, it actually makes getting the cooking time of all of this easier. With about five minutes in the microwave or in boiling water for each box, you could cook all the stuffing in the house in 83,125 hours (3,463.54 days).
So much for getting an early start on cooking dinner.
Sewing It All Up
So there you have it. No matter if you call it stuffing or dressing, no matter if you make it with sourdough or oysters, this awesome dish has become a necessary part of every Thanksgiving feast.
By the way, if you feel like enjoying the stuff all year round, you can buy or make it during any season, for any festive cravings. Or, you know, if you just really want to fill a house with it, since now you know how.
Bonus Stuffings
Empire State Building
Boxes of stuffing: 1,476,300,000
Pounds of stuffing: 546,231,000
Cooking time: 123,025,000 hours
Taj Majal
Boxes of Stuffing: 7,980,000
Pounds of stuffing: 2,952,600
Cooking time: 665,000 hours
White House
Boxes of Stuffing: 39,884,040
Pounds of stuffing: 14,757,095
Cooking time: 3,323,670 hours
Sidney Opera House
Boxes of Stuffing: 35,112,000
Grams of stuffing: 12,991,440
Cooking time: 2,926,000 hours
