Okay, so the other day I was making chicken for dinner, and I got to thinking – how much does one of these chicken breasts actually weigh? I mean, recipes always say “one chicken breast,” but they seem to vary in size so much. So, I decided to do a little experiment.
Getting Started: The Raw Material
First, I grabbed my kitchen scale – gotta have the right tools, right? Then, I took out a package of boneless, skinless chicken breasts from the fridge. They looked pretty average-sized, nothing huge, nothing tiny.
Weigh-In Time
- I placed the first chicken breast on the scale. It came in at around 200 grams.
- The second one was a bit smaller, weighing about 180 grams.
- And the third was the biggest of the bunch, at roughly 220 grams.
So, based on my super scientific sample of three chicken breasts, it looks like they average out to around 200 grams each, give or take. That’s about 7 ounces, for those of us who don’t speak metric.
The Cooking Factor
But wait, there’s more! I knew that chicken loses some weight when you cook it, because of the moisture evaporating. So, I seasoned those chicken breasts, popped them in the oven, and baked them until they were cooked through.
The Post-Cooking Weigh-In
Once they were cooled down a bit, I weighed them again. Here’s what I found:
- The first one, which started at 200 grams, was now about 150 grams.
- The 180-gram breast was down to around 135 grams.
- And the big 220-gram one was now about 165 grams.
See? They definitely lost some weight! It looks like about 25% of the weight disappeared during cooking, which makes sense.
So, there you have it. My little kitchen experiment showed that a raw chicken breast is generally around 6-8 ounces, and a cooked one is closer to 4-6 ounces. Of course, this can vary a bit, but it’s a good general guideline. Now I feel a little more confident when I’m following recipes!
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