Calories in food cooked on the bone / in the shell

ShammersPink

Tonight I'm having jumbo prawns. They weigh about 30g each raw, but that is in their shell. Any idea for an estimation of edible weight and thus calories and macros? I don't like to use a generic entry, because prawn weight varies massively, even within prawns given the same description.

I could weigh the shells after consumption, but they will be covered in sauce or marinade, and also cooked, so might have lost weight.

Likewise, rabbit. I had a rabbit stew, which made up 6 portions, and knew the starting weight of the raw rabbit, but in this case, it was more difficult to subtract bone weight, as we only had a third of it, and froze the rest.

At other times, I have similar issues with chicken, peasant, whole fish, other shellfish etc.

CyberTone

For the prawns, collect the inedible portion, place in a colander, rinse, let dry, and weigh.

For meats, either cut the meat from the bone before cooking or plan a little extra time to remove the bones after cooking prior to weighing the cooked batch before serving.

By the way, I hope you are preparing pheasant and not a peasant; peasants can be awfully tough to catch.

ShammersPink

They are revolting.

Catching them is the ghillie's job.

avskk

For some of these search for the item with the words "edible portion" added -- this is really helpful for oysters, fiddly chicken wings, etc. It's not perfect, though; for true precision you should use @CyberTone's method.

Francl27

I usually weigh them cooked without shells.

ShammersPink

So... 365 grams of raw prawns (12 prawns) yielded 117g heads and shells, so 248g "meat". So that is 68% of starting weight. So I shall use that as an approximation for future meals, when using that sort of prawn.

For the rabbit etc, I want it cooked on the bone, as it gives a better flavour, and I don't want to fiddle about de-boning before serving - I'd rather serve a leg on a bone in its stew.

The raw rabbit meat on the bone weighed 1139g. I made a guesstimate that that would yield about 800g raw meat. It's not precise, but it was the best I could do. I just wondered if there was a database of average % yields - I'm sure I saw something somewhere about what percentage of a banana was edible, for example.