All righty. So I've been using my food scale a lot more lately, but today I'm running into an issue that I can't quite figure out (and I have a feeling that I'm going to feel sublimely stupid if/when someone posts the answer, haha.)

When dealing with bone-in chicken pieces, how do you calculate the weight? Like, okay, if I weigh a chicken leg and it's 6 ounces, that's the weight including the bone. But I'm not planning to eat the bones (I haven't gotten quite that desperate....yet.) So how do you figure that out?

I weigh the whole thing, then weigh the bones/whatever I didn't eat and subtract that from the original total.
Or you could take the meat off the bone and weigh it on a container on your scale (use the tare function to eliminate the weight of the container).

This is NOT a dumb question....I've often wondered the very same thing.

I use the numbers that are in the sparkpeople database (which is what I use for food tracking). The numbers seem to make sense in comparison to boneless chicken, but I've never known if it was really right. I've called it close-enough and good-enough but it would be nice to be a bit more accurate.

Great idea!

That is friggin' brilliant (and probably something I should have been able to come up with on my own, right?) Thanks!

And next time you won't have to weigh the bones because they won't be much different.

Good point!

Or you can use a calorie counting resource that has done the math for you. Most online calorie counters will include calories and weights for chicken prepared and presented in various ways, so you search until you find the calories listed for bone-in chicken., cooked the way yours is, and of the same approximate weight.

You'll usually find both cooked and raw calculations, so if you weigh before cooking, use the raw calculations, and if you weigh after cooking, use that.

You'll even find calculations for various weights of chicken pieces, so you can just browse the various sizes you find for the one closest to your own, or use the "medium" by default.

Some calculators online even let you plug in the weight of your food and calculate for that, again just look for the listing description that specifies that the weight given includes the bone.