Cutting up the Meat Birds

We left off on Tuesday after the chicken butchering was done.  Well, it's not exactly done.  We still need to cut them up and put them in the freezer.  While the freshly butchered birds go through rigor mortis, chilling in cool water, we take a break for a few hours.  I use that opportunity to re-sharpen the knives.  My Chicago Cutlery knives do a great job, but they must be razor sharp to keep taking the abuse they take.  When we cut up the chickens, we'll be cutting through bone - on 47 birds!

Here is our first bird.  We weigh each bird (more on that later) and label a gallon-sized freezer bag with the weight and the date.  We are now ready to cut.  We use a variation of the typical 8-piece cut up that yields two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, and two breasts.  Except we add the neck and backbone and then cut the breast in half.

I was going to do step-by-step, but my hands get too messy (and we have a lot of birds to cut up).  the first thing I do is slit the skin between the thigh and the carcass.

After cutting the drums, thighs, wings, neck and backbone off, we're left with the breast.  I heart chicken!

Here is a photo of the 8 piece cut up ready to go in the bag but before I cut the breasts in half.

After all are cut up and bagged, we put them on ice in two ice chests.  We've learned not to overwhelm our deep freezers.  While leaving the rest on ice, we put a few in the freezer and allow them to freeze.  Then we add a few more.  And so on and so forth until they are all in the freezer.

Here they are.  47 birds in the deep freeze.

We've also learned to put t-shirts between each bag so that we can pull out individual bags of chicken.  If you don't do this, you have to get a crow bar and a hammer to get a bag of chicken out for supper!

In our next post, we'll look at the numbers.  How did we compare in total pounds harvested over last year?  What about cost per bird?  Fatality rate?  Feed cost per bird?  Well, we'll find out the answer to those questions and others as we look at the numbers.  Bon Jour!