How to gut a chicken

Yesterday we documented the chicken butchering that we did at our house.  I sort of breezed through the Evisceration Station so as not to make the blog post unbearably long.  With this post, I'd like to go into a little more detail on that step.

You start with a scalded, plucked bird and the first thing you do is remove the feet.  What you do is bend the leg a little bit backwards and cut right in the joint:


Taking the feet off

This is Warren, a friend of mine who helps out on butchering day.  I help him out when he butchers his chickens as well.  We sort of mimic the Amish Barn Raisings.  Warren is a beekeeper and we trade him fresh milk from our cows for honey from his bees.  We joke around and say that we live in a land "flowing with milk and honey!"  Warren is showing the chicken feet that he's just removed.  (I always wanted a house with a picket fence - and chicken feet.)


Chicken feet

The next step is removing the head.  You don't even need a knife for this part.  Simply push against the breast with your non-dominant hand and using leverage, pull the head over the side of the table and down with your dominant hand.  The chicken's head pops off with relative ease.

Now make an incision right where the neck meets the breast and what you're looking for is the windpipe and crop.  We don't feed the chickens the night before we butcher them.  This makes things a lot cleaner since a lot of the food has been digested and has... exited the bird.  So the crop will be empty and may be somewhat hard to find.

Locating the esophagus and crop

The esophagus and crop has been located and loosened from the neck by running your fingers underneath them and pulling them away from the neck.

Esophagus and crop

Here is another shot of it.  The esophagus is ribbed, almost like a plastic pipe.  You'll want these loosened as we're going to pull this out from the bottom in just a minute or two.


Now that you've got that loosened, turn the bird around and we're going to work from the other end.  Make an incision right above the vent (the orifice that the chicken poops from), being careful not to cut too deeply.  You do NOT want to cut anything in the chicken's cavity.  You just want an incision big enough to get your fingers in.

Making a cut above the vent

It was hard to get a picture of this step.  Once you have a small incision above the vent, put your fingers in there and with both hands, tear a hole big enough for you to put your entire hand into the bird's chest cavity.  You want to do this with your hands, not a knife, as you don't want to perforate the intestines inside the bird.


Tearing a hole so that you can get your hands inside the bird

Insert your hand into the cavity of the bird, running the back of your hand up the back side of the breast as far as you can go.  You should be able to feel the heart.  Wrap your fingers around the heart and pull everything out.  The windpipe, crop, heart, liver, intestines, and gizzard should all come easily out of the bird as shown below.  Now all of the entrails, from the intestine to the crop is only connected to the bird by the vent.  Carefully cut the around the vent to remove the entire vent and all guts from the bird.  The next thing to do is remove the lungs.  Run your hand back inside the bird.  The lungs are molded tightly to the ribcage on either side of the backbone.  You can use your finger to loosen them from the ribcage and pull them out.  You can't miss them.  They will be bright pink.
 

Removing all of the guts

Pick up the liver and there should be a little green organ attached to it.  That is the gall bladder and it is full of green bile that the liver makes and stores in the gall bladder.  You want to be really, really careful not to bust this as it will contaminate everything it touches.  Simply pinch it off at its base.  You may have to sacrifice a bit of the liver to do this.  Throw the gall bladder away.


Removing the gall bladder from the liver

From the pile of guts, pull off the heart and throw it in the heart pot that is iced down.  The heart is a muscle and is good to eat. 

Chicken hearts

Once the gall bladder is removed, put the chicken livers in a separate container.  These are great to eat as well.  We like to put some butter in a cast iron skillet and pan fry the livers.  Good stuff!



Chicken Livers

Finally, pull the gizzard off of the gut pile and put in the gizzard pot.  A little later we'll clean these up by cutting them in half and removing the grass, rocks, oyster grit that is stored in the gizzard.  We'll also remove the yellow lining of the gizzard.


Gizzards

The last step we do is remove the oil gland.  It is a bulging gland right on the tail.  You can see it right below the knife blade.  Simply make a cut to remove it. 

Cutting out the oil gland

Ta da!  Here is the gutted bird, ready to be put on ice, aged overnight and then cut up into the standard 8 piece cut up chicken and frozen in a gallon freezer bag.  Note that we hose it down real good and try to keep the bird and the cutting surface very clean.  

Winner, Winner Chicken Dinner!

Warren has timed himself and can completely gut a bird in two minutes.  He's fast.  I haven't tried to time myself.  I like to take my time.  The knives we're using are very sharp and I don't want to lose a finger!