A question about chicken

brookemart81

I've pretty much always cooked with boneless skinless chicken breasts, but lately the quality of the ones I've been buying have been off- they're stringy and tough no matter how I cook them. So I've started buying bone-in skin-on chicken breasts instead. You can throw them in the oven to roast for 35-40 minutes and they invariably come out PERFECT- juicy and tender and much more flavorful. You can discard the skin, pull the meat off the bone, and use it in whatever you are cooking- salads, pasta, tacos, etc. This is my new favorite way to cook chicken.

My question is how to log it. There are entries for boneless skinless chicken, and entries for chicken with skin- but how do you figure out the calories for chicken when it's cooked with the skin, but the skin isn't eaten? Cooking it this way is obviously adding fat and calories- that's why it comes out juicier and more delicious. But surely not as much as actually eating the skin. It's hard to know exactly because there are SO many chicken entries in the database and I don't know which ones are most accurate (another issue!) but with skin vs. without skin does seem to make a pretty big difference in the calories, so I don't like the idea of just guessing on this.

Does anyone know how this should be calculated and logged?

DaivaSimone

The reason why it comes out juicier (mainly) is because the bone and the skin help to retain de meat juice inside the chicken (instead of evaporating, as when you roast a boneless-skinless chicken breast). The juices inside the meat is all natural juice that should be in the meat anyway. Sure, there will be a little fat from the skin that will baste your meat, but it will slip on it (it isn't absorbed). So if you remove the skin and the bone after cooking, you're basically having a cooked skinless-boneless chicken breast. That's how I log them.

brookemart81

Oh awesome!