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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| It's all worth it! |
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