Happy Cheapskate: Where's the cheapest chicken?

Of all the food research I've done in the past few months, there have only been a couple of things that really surprised me.

One dealt with the price of store-made and takeout salads. (They're actually not a bad deal.) This chicken research kinda blew me away, too. I know, I need more excitement in my life.

One might assume that cooking your own chicken would be the cheapest way to get the most meat for your grocery dollar. Well, one would be wrong. I was, too.     

Before we get to the meat of the issue — sorry — here's what I did.

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I picked up four types of chicken product from a St. John's grocery store: a raw chicken from Country Ribbon; a cooked, hot BBQ chicken; cold breaded chicken wings in Sobey's deli section; and a box of seasoned, breaded chicken pieces that looked pretty high end.

My quest? To peel off all the skins, batters, bread and bones and see which product actually gives the most chicken meat.

It was pretty gross. 

Some things were easy to peel and debone.

Other chicken products took forever to separate.

After all the peeling and weighing — and I hope I never have to de-bread or debone another chicken part ever! — here are the results. For easy comparison, I broke things down into price per 100 grams of meat.

The chicken product that offered the most meat, per 100 grams, is NOT the home cooked bird, which lost about 400 grams during the cooking process.

The bird with the most meat at the best price was the cooked chicken from Sobeys hot section.

I'm not saying EVERY home cooked chicken would be more expensive than a pre-cooked bird from the grocery store. But this one was.

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What about takeout chicken?

Since I was on a chicken roll (pardon the pun), I decided to check out the cost of some restaurant chicken products.

First, the ever-popular Big Mary.

The Big Mary gave me about 55 grams of chicken meat and 40 grams of breading. The cost of the entire sandwich was $6.42, including bun, mayo and pickle.

If you want to get 100 grams of meat, you'd have to buy two at about $12.50.

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A much better deal meat-wise is the dark meat special. A thigh and drumstick cost $5.29 and gave 81 grams of meat (109 grams batter and bones). With that comes a wee container of slaw or salad. If it were possible to get 100 grams of meat, you'd have to spend $6.60.  

Finally, a meal from the chicken mecca.

The Quarter Chicken Dinner with white meat cost $11.49 and came with fries (205 grams, size of a good potato) and a roll. I got a lot of meat — 145 grams.  (That's $7.66 for 100 grams, including the aforementioned carbohydrates.)