Thursday, May 5, 2016

2016 Meat Bird Butchering Saturday (Part 2)

We’ll continue where we left off yesterday.  We’ve killed, scalded, plucked, de-headed, de-footed, and gutted the bird.  We flip the bird on its stomach and use a knife to remove the oil gland on the tail.  Now we spray the nice carcass off with water.


I had previously sterilized a big blue bucket with a bleach solution and filled it with cool water.  This water bath serves a dual purpose: First, it keeps pesky flies from coming and lighting on your birds.  Flies are attracted by all the blood & guts.  If you butcher later on as it gets hotter, fans are a necessity to keep the flies off of the butcher table.  Flies cannot get to a submerged bird.  Secondly, the water bath cools the birds off.  Live birds are warm-blooded, obviously, and when you scald them, you raise the temperature more.  The water serves to quickly cool down your chickens.

The Water Bath to Cool Down
When all the birds are in the tub, we begin ‘finessing.’  Most of the hard tasks are done, but the fine-tuning remains.  We’ll take out the hearts from the iced container, cut them in half and remove any clotted blood that may be inside.  We’ll freeze the hearts in a Zip Loc bag and they’ll be cooked in a nice gravy later.

The livers don’t require much work, except I forgot to mention an important step yesterday that I’ll mention now.  When you pull the organs from the cavity of the bird, there will be a dark green sac attached to the liver – that’s the gall bladder.  Using caution, slice the gall bladder away from the liver.  You don’t want to burst it.  If you do, quickly wipe up the green liquid so as not to contaminate your bird or the butcher table.  The livers will be sprayed off with water and packed in zip loc bags where we will fry them in butter, or make delicious pate, or wrap with bacon and broiled.  So good.  Good for you, too.

On to the next organ – the gizzard.  Chickens don’t have teeth, so they can’t chew their food like us.  The gizzard performs this role.  Chickens swallow oyster shells, rocks or other hard objects that reside in their gizzard to break down food helping digest it.  Gizzards require some cleaning.  First, pull the fat off of the outside of the gizzard and then cut the gizzard in half.

Cut the Gizzard in half
When you open it up, you’ll see that the gizzard of a pasture raised bird is filled with GRASS!  This is a very good thing.  Your bird will be healthy and by eating it – you will be too!

Pastured Poultry Proof!

Dump the grass/small rocks into your “gut bucket” and grab the yellow lining of the gizzard and pull off.  It has the texture of plastic and thus, is inedible.


It peels off easily.  That goes in the compost as well.


Wash the gizzards off and these can be placed in a Zip Loc bag for freezing.  If you don’t cook them right, gizzards can be like chewing on a piece of a rubber tire, but Tricia makes a dish, Gizzards & Rice that we enjoy. 

While the chickens continue to soak and cool down, we begin putting away the pots and burner and killing cones and cleaning up.  I dig a trench between the rows in the garden and dump the feathers into the trench.

Composting Feathers
I also dump the guts into the trench as well.  This will decompose in the garden soil, enriching it and grow good vegetables for us.  It is the same concept basically that the Indians taught the settlers of America in burying fish alongside their corn.  As I think about this, there are the guts of hundreds of birds in the garden.

Composting the Guts
Once everything is cleaned up, we’ll relax for a while.  Then I’ll pull out my whetstones, honing oil, and sharpening steel and I’ll re-sharpen the knives.  Cutting up chicken requires a sharp knife!

Sharpening the knives again 
One by one, I’ll pull the whole birds out of the water bath and cut them up into 9 pieces: 2 wings, 2 drumsticks, 2 thighs, 2 breasts, and a neck/backbone piece.

Cutting up the birds
We like to keep good records.  I’ll report average weights and other statistics later, but we weigh each bird and mark the weight and date in a journal and on the outside of a gallon-sized Zip Loc bag.  Each bird goes in its own bag.

Bagged, cut up chicken 
We’ll then place the bags into an ice chest surrounded by ice and we’ll allow them to ‘age’ for 8 hours before transferring them to their icy tomb in our deep freeze.

Aging the birds on ice for 8 hours
In past years, we butchered about 75 birds for us to eat throughout the year.  Now that we have two in college, we only butcher about 50 birds for our consumption throughout the year.  We work hard on a Saturday (or three) and then we enjoy the fruits of our labors all throughout the year. 

It's all worth it! 
A nice, homegrown bird is a good thing.   “A Chicken in Every Pot & and Every Man a King".

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...