I'm gonna eat some costco rotisserie chicken and mashed potatoes. How on earth do I log that?

Losingthedamnweight

Me and my daughter are gonna ravage the hell out of a Costco rotisserie chicken. How do I log that? I dont have a food scale or anything.

LifeChangz

in the food log, include the word costco to bring up things like hindquarters, legs, wings.... skin and bone removed too. maybe look for options by cups for the mashed taters in the food log too.

AnnPT77

Get a scale. They're only around $20 from a big box store or Amazon or whatever, and it will make your logging process much faster and easier**, as well as more accurate. Until it arrives, the advice above is good.

** Examples of faster and easier:

* Assembling a salad in a bowl, a stew in a pan, sandwich on a plate? Put the bowl/pan/plate on the scale, zero, add an ingredient, note the weight, zero, add the next ingredient, note the weight . . . .

* Using something from a carton or jar, or cutting a slice from a hunk of cheese? Put the container or chunk on the scale, zero, take out portion, note the negative value (it's the amount you took out).

* Eating a whole apple, banana, un-hulled strawberries, corn on the cob? Weigh the ready-to-eat food, eat the yummy parts, weigh the core/hulls/peel, subtract & note.

Retroguy2000

Mashed potato you can find an estimate for, I'm sure.

First Google search for the chicken says this below. Google also says they are three pounds. That makes a total of about 1,900 calories for the chicken. If other sources suggest similar, I'd ballpark it that way.

For each 3.5-ounce serving of the Costco chicken, there are 138 calories, 347 milligrams of sodium, 6 grams of fat and 17 grams of protein.

Read More: https://www.thedailymeal.com/cook/15-secrets-499-costco-rotisserie-chicken-slideshow

crb426

You can find a generic rotisserie chicken data entry and do your best guess, but I would highly recommend getting a food scale. I loved this one from Amazon until it got off-balance after 8 years of use, and it's only about $10.
https://www.amazon.com/Ozeri-ZK14-S-Digital-Multifunction-Kitchen/dp/B004164SRA/ref=sr_1_8?crid=4DMD4TLAN8HN&keywords=food+scale&qid=1673132491&sprefix=food+sc,aps,557&sr=8-8

I use it to measure everything including my coffee grounds, to guarantee the best cup of coffee.

PAV8888

How do you inflate a tire without a pressure gauge? You eyeball it. And probably don't get it right.
Mind you... by adding some air, even if you're just eyeballing it, you ARE saving yourself from driving on your rims! So better than nothing, even if not optimal!

Rotisserie chicken as a complete entry, or separated by type of meat or parts of the chicken including whether you are eating the skin or not and whether the removal was before or after cooking... all these entries exist.

But you won't really know exactly how much chicken you're eating... so that part will be a guess.

Costco rotisserie chickens tend to be significantly larger than what's sold at other stores. The 3lb (cooked) mark seems to be a good guess if no weight is marked on the outside of the box. In general I would consider a Costco chicken to be about 1.5x larger than a "typical" chicken.

So if I wasn't trusting my own weight estimates, I would search for "chicken, broiler, rotisserie" on FoodData Central. Then I would look at the ELEVEN SR Legacy results that are there, and pick the ones I would use according to what I was eating. Then I would search for the exact wording on MFP and for weight I would use 1.5x the typical value (which can be found on FoodData Central). F.e. that would be 95g for one thigh, or 71g for one drumstick.

Note that the breast looks to me to be the complete breast; not each half side. So it would be 0.75x for each side.

A long time ago I took apart three chickens including one from Costco and weighed and measured them as example chickens but I can't seem to be able to find the old MFP user created blog entries!

tomcustombuilder

You really need a scale. Put the pieces you will eat on the scale then when you’re done put the bones on the scale and weigh then subtract that amount from the whole pieces.

It’s super hard to be remotely accurate with counting calories without a scale

kshama2001

BJ's says their rotisserie chicken is 3 pounds, but that is RAW and with the skin and bones. It is considerably less cooked and deboned. The weight for Costo's chicken may also be for raw chickens.

Do get a food scale, but in the meantime you can use a cooked chicken entry and cups.

I was so glad when I got a food scale and did not have to fret about how tightly I was supposed to pack cups. Plus then I had less dishes to wash.

PAV8888

Costco birds are over 1.3kg cooked vs other groceries coming in at anywhere from 800 to 900g cooked weight. That weight, of course, includes everything in the box.

900g is about 2lb. 1.3kg is very close to 3lb so I would add a Canadian Costco data point supporting the 3lb per Costco bird general Google search sentiment.

As an aside, in my missing rotisserie chicken blog entry from 2014/2015, the Costco bird had incrementally more edible vs wasted compared to the smaller other store ones as a percentage in addition to absolute value. Small difference but noticable

westrich20940

I often eat rotisserie chicken and if I've bought a whole one and picked it off the bones at home, I'd weigh it (kitchen scales are fairly cheap/accessible)....but otherwise I just choose 'rotisserie chicken' from the database......look at a number of the entries and pick one in the middle.

Seems to have been OK, more or less. One day isn't going to ruin anything if you're off.