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The chicken wing math didn't add up until I weighed them raw vs cooked
I was meal prepping wings for game day last Saturday and got curious about the nutrition numbers. Every recipe site said a serving of wings is about 4 ounces. But after cooking 2 pounds of raw wings in my air fryer at 380 for 25 minutes, I weighed the finished batch and it came down to just 1.3 pounds. That is a 35 percent weight loss from all the fat and water that rendered out. So when people track their macros by eating 4 ounces of cooked wings they are actually eating way more than they think. I looked it up on the USDA database and found the official conversion factor for chicken wings is 0.65. Has anyone else run into this with chicken thighs or drumsticks where the cooked weight is way less than expected?
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pat_stone26d ago
Gotta ask, are you really weighing what you're actually eating though?
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lily5726d ago
Well, that's a fair question, but I think the bigger issue is how many of us weigh things wrong without realizing it. I mean, if your scale isn't calibrated right or you're not zeroing it out before you put the bowl on, your numbers are off from the start. And I've noticed people tend to weigh their food in chunks, like one big piece of chicken, instead of cutting it up and making sure it's an even amount. So it's not just about whether you're weighing, it's about the method behind it.
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barbara_grant426d ago
You've got a really good point there. I had the same surprise when I started weighing my chicken thighs after baking, they shrank way more than I expected too. It's frustrating because all those online nutrition calculators just assume the weight stays the same, which messes up any careful tracking.
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