OmManiPadmeOmelet wrote:

> Need some help here, if you are trying to estimate protein grams and
> calorie counts for dietary restriction, do you weigh the meat raw or
> cooked?

Cooked. The % balance of nutrients will change in the process, mostly
with loss of both fat and water-based juices.

Use the USDA database. It's what most of the others are based on.
<http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/>

But I caution you against trying to get exact figures. First, there are
only charts for the dead food that's already gone. Yours may be
different sizes or different composition or whatever. Second, since your
caloric usage isn't calculated exactly, your intake can't be, either.
Since everybody's body uses food differently than everybody else's, it
will be trial and error until you get a good handle on your needs.

The database is a good, useful approximation.

> What do you do about bone-in chicken and meat weight estimates?

You use yield factors for things like that. Professional culinary texts
will often carry that kind of info.

Here's a quick chart for bone-in Chicken:
% usable meat/finished portion ounces from 1 pound cooked
Whole Body 52-54%/8.5
Parts Breast 62-64%/10.0
Hindquarter 48-50%/8.0 (leg and thigh)
Drumstick 46-48%/7.5
Thigh 52-54%/8.5
Wing 42-45%/7.0

These are "reasonable" values for average chickens.

> I'm grilling some chicken drumsticks, what is the meat weight versus the
> bone weight?

Depends on the age of the critter when it was killed, although a
reasonably normal yield ratio is 46% to 48% of cooked weight, depending
on degree of doneness. The more cooked, the less weight. Less fat, less
moisture. The cook range for the percentages is 160° to 180°. I can't
recommend the higher temperature finish. Dry chicken.

> I know I can just de-bone the cooked meat and weigh it by itself... ;-)
> I'll have to wait until they cool enough to do that.

Nah. Weigh the cooked whatever before you eat and then weigh the sad,
depleted and savaged carcass afterward. Those poor, innocent, pillaged,
gnawed bones. Subtract the weight of the formerly living, breathing
flesh from the now-murdered, plundered bones. Voila. The difference
("delta" to an engineer or mathematician) is the weight of what you
actually consumed.

Or you can eat it, weighing yourself before and after.

No, seriously...

Pastorio