• Question: What is the chemical formula for chicken?

    Asked by anon-202050 to Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily, Andy on 4 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Emily Lewis

      Emily Lewis answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      What an amazing question!

      The short answer is that the chemical formula would be too long to write here-

      The long answer is that there are loads of different chemicals that make up the body of a chicken, you’ve got water (H20, there is water in the cells, the organs and the tissue), you’ve got proteins which are really long chains of amino acids (an example of an amino acid is histidine- C6H9N3O2) and lots of carbohydrates which are mainly made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen as the name suggests. There are loads more molecules and chemicals that get quite complicated like fat and DNA and blood.

      That’s about as much as I know, maybe ask a biologist to find out more?

    • Photo: Sarah O'Sullivan

      Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      Side note: there’s been a lot more papers published on the composition of chicken than I ever would have imagined…

      So lets assume it’s just the poultry meat of the chicken. A paper by Jorge Soranio (Chemical Composition and Nutritional Content of Raw Poultry Meat, 2010) gives the composition of chicken as 74.6% water, 1% ash, 12.1% protein, 11.1% lipid (fat) and 1.2% carbohydrate. So all you need to do is write out the formulae for each, for example 0.746 H2O 0.01 ash 0.0121 protein, and then sum up all the different elements in your formula. This gets complicated as ash can contain many products of combustion, there are many types of protein, fat and carbohydrate (usually long hydrocarbon chains). But make an assumption on what these are, multiply each element by it’s percentage coefficient (number in front of it when written out) and total it all up and you’ll have your formula for chicken.

      My formula for cooking a good roast chicken is to bring the bird to room temperature and dry it’s skin and cavity before roasting it at 220C for about an hour. Serve with Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes and veg of your choice

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      There’s a joke that physicists use very over-simplified models of things to make the maths easier. To a physicist, a chicken would just be a chicken-sized sphere of water!

    • Photo: George Fulton

      George Fulton answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      Sophia is right. Simple bodies are typically the best. It’s probably not the worst idea, if you want a rough estimate of the chemical formula, to assume that the chicken consists of just carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O). Assuming that the chicken is around 60% water, then the (empirical) chemical formula is: H6O7C2. So the chicken is 78% oxygen, 17% carbon and 5% hydrogen by mass. If you compare this to that of a human, you get pretty consistent values. According to Wikipedias ‘compositon of the human body’ article, a human is 65% oxygen, 18.5% carbon and 9.5% hydrogen. So this estimate isn’t a dreadful one!

    • Photo: Andy Buckley

      Andy Buckley answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      C H I K_3 N — carbon, hydrogen, iodine, three potassiums, and a nitrogen. That’s science*

      * That’s not science

    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      During my university physics degree we were asked a question on how long it would take to perfectly cook a chicken. We were suggested to imagine the chicken was spherical and made of water…

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