Chicken Butchering - Spring 2015

"A Family that Slays Together, Stays Together" -Anonymous

(Oh wait, maybe I quoted that incorrectly...)

Each year we raise a number of Cornish Cross meat birds, butcher them, and fill our freezer with them, so we never have to go to the store to buy chicken.  We eat on our own birds all year long, confident that the birds don't have any medicine, antibiotics, hormones, etc.  We know how they were raised and killed and feel that this affords our family the healthiest and best protein source around. Our family members and friends gather to assist us and we work together as a team to get the job done.

Saturday marked the 10 week timeframe at which we normally butcher our Cornish Cross meat birds. Over the past few years we've learned that a 6 pound bird will yield a 4 and 1/2 pound cleaned carcass and that's what we shoot for as experience has shown us that this is a nice sized bird for many dishes.  This year, as you might have read from previous posts, we've experienced more difficulties than we ever have and we attribute that to horrible weather conditions and perhaps genetic issues with the birds.  To summarize, we've had an extremely high mortality rate, coupled with very slow growth, leg and prolapsed vent issues, and an unexplained slower conversion rate of feed to protein. It has been like the perfect storm - both literally and figuratively!

A friend met me on Friday night and we decided to weigh all of the birds.  We lowered our historical 6 pound weight standard and decided to butcher all of the birds that weighed in excess of 4 and 3/4 pounds, while leaving birds that weighed less than 4 and 3/4 pounds to continue to grow.  Here are the candidates for butchering on Saturday morning - 43 birds.  We moved them to an enclosure on concrete so that they would be cleaner and stopped feeding them 1/2 day prior to butchering to ensure that the food would be worked through their digestive systems. Both of those procedures help to ensure that the slaughter would be a (somewhat) clean process.

43 Cornish Cross Meat Birds Ready for Slaughter

Here are the remaining birds that didn't meet our self-imposed weight limit.  It amounted to 30 birds. Like a small fish, we'll "throw these back" so they can continue to grow.  We'll weigh again in a couple of weeks.  This part hurts to type. We started with 117 birds.  At this point we have 73 total birds.  That equates to a whopping 35% mortality rate!  We've never lost anywhere near this amount of birds.  I won't editorialize on how dismal that is, but will tell you that it has made us re-think our entire way of doing things.

30 Cornish Cross & Red Ranger Meat Birds that will continue to grow

We set up several different stations.  The first station is the Killing Cones. Chickens are brought from the enclosure by Benjamin and Carson, put into the cones, head-first, and then the chicken's jugular veins are cut, allowing the bird's heart to pump out all of the blood into buckets until they are blood-free and officially pronounced dead.  The cones hold them tightly, avoiding bruising that comes from 'flopping around.'

Carson and Benjamin keeping the killing cones full

Benjamin administers the quick incision, aiming for a clean cut that will quickly cause the bird to bleed out.  The blood is collected in the buckets where it will be later buried in the garden, providing nutrients that will be beneficial in growing vegetables for our table.

Bleeding Out

The second station is the Scalding Station.  This station in manned by our friend, Dale, who is a veteran in the scalding process.  We use a crawfish boiling pot filled with water atop a propane burner for scalding the dead birds.  We add a bit of dish washing liquid that seems to help prepare the feathers for removal in the next station.

Notice that a thermometer is clipped to the pot.  The temperature is monitored to ensure that it stays right around 145 - 148 degrees Fahrenheit.  Any cooler and the feathers won't come off cleanly - any hotter and you are cooking the bird.  The bird is dunked and pulled up several times.  At the point upon which a tail feather or wing feather is able to be pulled out easily, you know the scalding process is complete and you can move the bird along to the next station.

Scalding birds in the crawfish pot

The birds are dispatched to the third station, The Plucking Station.  This is a Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker based on Herrick Kimball's invention and this contraption is a time-saver and a thing of beauty.  My Dad, a veteran on the Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker, expertly runs the machine, knowing when to stop it.  If you run it for too long, it can tear up the meat.  If you don't run it long enough, you'll leave feathers on the bird.

Spraying down the birds spinning in the Whiz Bang

A clothes dryer motor powers the machine which is pulley driven and spins the plate on the bottom. Rubber fingers on the bottom plate and screwed into the sides gently pull the feathers off as the bird spins inside while being sprayed down...

The Spin Cycle!

In mere seconds, you have a completely de-feathered bird!  The feathers drop to the ground below where they'll be composted later on in the afternoon.

Feathers 'a flyin'

A beautiful, clean carcass emerges where it is placed at the fourth station, The Quality Control Station.  My Mom takes care of this station, expertly inspecting the bird, removing any remaining feathers and cutting the feet off of the bird.  At this point the chicken's head is pulled off.  Both heads and feet go in the compost bucket.

Quality Control

Here are four nice birds who have had their feet cut off and are awaiting quality control, where any remaining feathers will be removed.  Tail feathers can be a little pesky sometimes.

On the Assembly Line

Then they'll move to the fifth station, The Eviscerating Station.  Tricia and I handle this.  The previous night, we sharpened our Chicago Cutlery knives and keep a steel handy to keep them sharp throughout the process.  We first cut an incision in the neck, pulling on the windpipe and loosening the crop.  Then we slice an incision right near the vent, reaching inside the carcass, running our hand up along the breastbone until we grab the heart.  Pulling firmly, we pull everything out of the incision.

We place the heart in a pot with ice, the gizzard in another pot with ice, and then we carefully remove the gall bladder from the liver and place the liver in another pot with ice.  We carefully cut around the vent and throw the entire digestive tract into the gut bucket.  We reach back in the carcass and pull the lungs out that are embedded alongside the rib cage.  Then we cut the oil gland out of the tail and give the bird a final washing out.

Gutting the chicken

The clean carcasses are put in buckets of water and allowed to cool down.  The chicken's body heat will dissipate in the cool water and when completely covered with water, will keep flies at bay.

A cooling off period

We were a little more than halfway finished when a storm blew through (wouldn't you know it?), bringing thunder, lightning, and another 8/10ths of an inch of rain and sending us scurrying to the garage to wait the storm out.

Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.

We finally set up a dining canopy to finish up the work without getting soaked.

Once the butchering was done, there is some cleanup involved, but essentially, we were done before noon after starting at around 8:30.  We have a bucket full of chicken guts, heads, and feet and blood that we'll need to take care of.

Gut bucket

I dug a trench in the garden and poured the contents of the bucket in the trench and covered it up. This will enrich the soil, increasing the fertility, not unlike the process that the Native Americans taught the Pilgrims with fish.

Soil Amendments for the Garden

We cleaned up the hearts, gizzards and livers and prepared for the freezer.  

Fresh Chicken Livers

And here is a photo of the Chicken Slayers for the Spring 2015 batch of meat birds. Each one provided great help and camaraderie and we made memories we won't soon forget.  I think the accurate quote listed at the top of this blog post is "A Family that PRAYS together, stays together," and we did indeed pray.  We held hands and prayed right before our lunch, thanking God for our lives and the provision He gives.  We went into town and bought a big boxful of (what else?) Popeye's Spicy Fried Chicken & biscuits to consume.  As long as we were killing chickens, we might as well eat them, right?

Tired Chicken Processors

Once we finished eating, we cut up all 43 birds into an 8 piece cut up and packaged each one into gallon sized freezer bags.  They were packed in ice and later moved into our freezer for storage. We'll rinse, wash, and repeat with the remaining 30 birds in a couple (or three) weeks and then do it all again next year.