Chicken – Protein in cooked vs. raw chicken breast filet

chickenchicken-breast

I'm a bit confused by the label on an uncooked versus a cooked chicken breast. Both mention 23g of protein per 100 g of product:

enter image description here

If I cook the raw chicken myself, it loses a lot of water, so after cooking it only weighs 80% of what it used to weigh, and as none of the protein evaporated, my cooked chicken now contains 23g of protein per 80g, (28.75g / 100g) whereas the store-bought cooked chicken has 23g of protein per 100g

Where does this discrepancy come from?

Best Answer

Proteins are complex chemical forms so it depends. Let me elaborate by giving 2 extreme examples:

  • If you boil an egg, the proteins unfold, hook into one another and therefore a liquid becomes a solid that doesn't melt again when you cool it down and there is no protein loss whatsoever.
  • if you burn a piece of chicken breast fillet to a crisp on a barbecue overnight, a lot of protein mass will be lost.

In your particular case, I see the following possibilities:

  1. there is an error in the label of one of the products and they probably did not send off their product for actual testing, but took their ingredient list from a database.
  2. the cooked chicken is encased in a batter and the end product just happens to have the same protein content as the uncooked chicken.

You should contact a local consumer protection program and have them send off both products for actual testing as these kinds of tests are quite expensive.

As your labels are German, I advise: https://www.test.de

Related Topic