I have some frozen chicken breasts that I need to cook before they freezer burn. I have a chicken and rice recipe that I want to try but it calls for 1 lb. of cooked chicken. I don’t own a kitchen scale and my bathroom scale is digital and won’t even register weights that low (and even if it did, it isn’t precise enough to tell me what I need to know.
Anyway, I have to thaw the meat and then fix dinner and it’s already after 6pm here. Thanks in advance.
An average-sized, boneless, chicken breast is 6-8 oz…so I’d go with 3, personally. A little extra chicken won’t really throw off a recipe like chicken and rice…you’ll just have a higher chicken-to-rice ratio.
Yep, I’ll second 6-8 oz, I just weighed two (totally coincidentally) I had cooked. One was 7.5 oz the other 9.25 oz.
Thanks! That information helped a lot. I’m going with two because the ones I have seem big and based on what you’re saying, it should be about right.
Looks like you’ve solved this already, but for what it’s worth you really only need to get within a factor of two or three for most chicken and rice type recipes. A half-pound probably would have been fine, and so would 2 pounds.
Chicken breasts usually weigh roughly what is indicated on the packaging…
Call me crazy, but couldn’t you have cooked all the chicken into the dish, and had slightly chicken-ier chicken and rice?
I cook a lot, and the only time sticking with the exact proportions listed in the recipe is important is for pastries and baked goods. And maybe you want to be careful with certain overpowering spices and herbs.
But otherwise, does it really matter whether you’ve got 1 pound of chicken or 2 in your rice? Does it really matter if you use 2 pounds of hamburger in your Hamburger Helper? Will it ruin your stew if you put some extra potatoes and onions in there? No, no and no.
Exactly. Recipes aren’t a chemistry experiment. Even baked goods are not quite as precise as people like to make them out to be (although a little variance here and there will make a difference in the final product. It’ll still be edible and good–just a bit different. For absolute consistency, weighing is key.) For something like this, as posters have said above, you can be off by a factor of two or more and you’ll get a fine product.
The key is, use and trust your senses. Does it look right? Does it taste right? If so, then it’s right. If not, adjust.