Chicken product stuffed with water

Fresh nibbles more expensive, but will give more bang for your buck

friend recently cooked these nibbles for her two young sons and found that by the time she had finished the nibbles weighed a lot less than the 1.5kg she started with.

In fact, she was left with just under half the weight in actual chicken, leading her to post on Facebook: “Is this normal?

Are they injecting the chicken with water?”

So this week I bought a pack and looked into it.

First, 100g of water was lost when the nibbles thawed which is understandable.

I didn’t put any marinade on which you would normally do because I didn’t want to risk adding water or the salt in the marinade, drawing water out of the chicken.

I’m astonished to say that when I weighed the chicken fresh out of the freezer it came in at 1.552kg, and after cooking I was left with just 847 grams of chicken to actually eat.

And it tasted dry and not very good because it didn’t have the usual soy sauce and honey marinade I used years ago for my kids.

Is there water in here? Yes there is.

Once cooked, 54 per cent of the total weight of this package ends up as actually chicken.

Nibbles have been “basted for extra tenderness”.

Six additives plus water in this package with the chicken. the day its 1.5kg of frozen chicken nibbles will boil down to about half that.

I suggest you buy fresh chicken nibbles in the butchery department.

I bought 1063g of chicken nibbles for $ 10.49 which works out at 99c per 100g which is the same price as the frozen nibbles which also work out at 99c per 100g.

When I cooked these, again with no marinade or salt to draw out the moisture, for the same length of time they weighed in at just 801g — so that’s a loss of about 25% which appeared to be mostly fat. So you’re getting more chicken on your plate.

They also tasted a whole lot better than the frozen ones, more like real chicken.

If you like your nibbles frozen, just throw the fresh ones in the freezer and you’ll save on the six additives plus a whole lot of water that these ones give you. Oh, and if you can, buy fresh free range nibbles to support humane treatment of chickens.

I went to Tegel for comment on the loss of moisture in cooking and got this reply:

“Nibbles have a large surface area for a small portion, which is where the moisture and fat loss occurs when the product is roasted. This loss is higher on nibbles than other portions.

In addition, Tegel nibbles are marinated ( TenderBasted) to remain tender and tasty on cooking, resulting in a small amount of additional moisture loss on cooking. Due to these factors it is likely that the weight of cooked nibbles ( with a high surface area to meat ratio) will be approximately 40 per cent- 50 per cent lower than the weight of the raw product when packed. In contrast, a whole chicken, when roasted would typically result in a moisture and fat loss of approximately 30 per cent.