Chicken Butchering Saturday

Our Cornish Cross meat chickens have had 9 weeks to grow and today was the day we circled on our calendars to butcher all 47 of them.  We'll show you our little system in butchering.  We get a little better every time we do it, but we haven't perfected the process and always think of things we can do differently the next time in order to be more efficient.  That's what we try to do with almost everything in life.

We normally have friends come over to help us and then we reciprocate and help them butcher their birds.  Tricia will make coffee and homemade biscuits and we visit before, during and after butchering.  Everyone lends a hand, except for Laura Lee, who for some reason is not real excited about butchering chickens.

Word of caution: If you are squeamish and get light-headed at the sight of blood and guts, I'd suggest tuning in on another day when I'm talking about puppies, butterflies or farm chores that are more pleasant.  There's really no way to show and explain butchering chickens without blood and gore.

The first thing we do is load up the chickens into the "meat wagon" to bring them from the chicken tractor out on the pasture to the area where we have things set up to butcher.  We're real simple and use a wagon that we normally pull behind the lawn tractor to pick up sticks, except today we fill it with meat birds and put a pallet over the top of it so they can't escape.  I had to make two separate trips to handle 47 birds.


Meat birds headed to slaughter

The first station in the butchering process is the "Killing Cones".  These are simply traffic cones that have been discarded along the side of the road that I pick up and recycle for this purpose.  They work out extremely well as the rubber holds the chicken tightly.  I cut a few inches off the top of the cones and turn the cone upside down and support them by two 2X4's.  Then I place the birds in the cones head first and pull the head until it is extended.


Cornish Cross in the killing cone

Okay, I'm sorry about this next picture, but every chicken that you eat is dead and hopefully doesn't still have blood in it.  I take a sharp knife and cut the carotid artery and let the chicken's heart pump out all of the blood.  You want to ensure all the blood is out and this is the best way to do it versus the old "wringing the neck" method.  This is a more humane way to handle this task.  The bird will simply "go to sleep" without a lot of thrashing around.


Bleeding out a bird

My little set-up allows me to bleed four birds at a time.  I position buckets underneath the birds to catch all of the blood, which is then put it in the compost pile.

Four at a time

And now we'll move to the second station - the scalding station.  The four birds that have been bled out are placed by the scalder and four more birds are put in the cones. We keep the process moving.  Everyone has a job and knows what to do.


Ready for scalding

We have five separate stations in our butchering process:

• The Killing Cones,
• The Scalder,
• The Plucker
• The Eviscerating Table/Quality Control
• The Chilling Tanks

Here is the scalding station.  We simply use a big pot that sits on top of a butane burner.   We normally use this pot for boiling crawfish and crabs.  We fill it with water and add a few drops of dish washing liquid and heat up the water.  You can see that we have a thermometer on the side of the pot.  It is so very important to keep the water temperature around 148 degrees Fahrenheit in order to scald them.  Any cooler and the feathers will not come off.  Any hotter and you'll cook the bird and it will get torn up in the plucker.  We use a dunking motion to aerate things and to ensure that the feathers all get wet.  The scalder keeps this process moving and then delivers the scalded bird to the next station.


Scalding the birds

We keep testing the feathers.  Once you can pull out a wing feather and a tail feather with ease, the bird is ready to transition to the plucker.  Our plucker is a homemade rig that we bought the plans and parts for on the Internet.  It is called the Whiz Bang Chicken plucker and works great.  All you do is toss a scalded chicken (or two) in the plucker.  The disk on the bottom is attached to an electric motor that spins it and as you spray water on the bird, the feathers are removed by the rubber fingers. 

 

Whiz Bang Chicken plucker in action

In less than a minute, a bird comes out minus all his feathers, except for a few that Russ is removing before passing along to the next station.  Notice the Barred Rock laying hen by the gate in the background.  No doubt she's taking it all in and saying, "I'm thankful I'm not a meat bird."


Russ performing a little quality control

As the birds are plucked, they are lined up in front of the next station, the eviscerating table.  I'm going to go into a step by step process tomorrow on this and just give you the overview now for brevity.  First, the feet are cut off and the heads are pulled off.



Lined up and ready for gutting.

Here are a couple of shots of the gutting process going on.  Note the 3 kettles.  One holds the gizzards.  One for the hearts.  And one for the livers.  All the guts and waste go into a separate bucket beneath the hole in the table.  While the other stations take only one person, this one takes two as it takes more time.  If you only have one person, your assembly line will bottleneck.


Blood 'n Guts

It is important to have a hose at this station to continually spray things down to keep it sanitary.  Once the bird is gutted, we do some quality control to remove any feathers, organs, windpipe, etc. still on the bird to ensure our bird is clean as a whistle.

Getting the job done

Next is the final station, the Chilling tanks.  These big birds are warm.  Once you gut them, we drop them into sterilized buckets that have fresh, cold water in them.  We allow them to sit in the cool water for 30 minutes and then we dump all the water out and put fresh cold water back in.  This time we add ice as well and we allow to sit overnight to age a little prior to cutting them up into the standard 8 piece cut up and then freezing them in gallon Zip Loc freezer bags.


Chill Out

We've saved all the feet, heads and guts in a gut bucket. 

The gut bucket

To the gut bucket, we'll add all the feathers at the bottom of the Whiz Bang Chicken plucker.


Lots of feathers

We'll spray down the plucker to get all the feathers out of the machine. 

Finally we'll add the blood to the gut bucket and we'll go bury it all in the compost pile.  Everything goes back into the land and will help to grow great crops next year.  The animals and plants are all working together on our farm.

Tomorrow we'll show you a step by step walk-through of gutting a chicken.  The process of butchering 47 chickens took us two hours.  Not bad!