The Boucherie (Butchering) - Chicken Edition 2020

In Yesterday's Post we went over the fact that a sharp knife is critical and crucial for butchering.  In French, butchering is called the "boucherie" (BOO - SHREE) and on a beautiful Saturday morning, it was the thing on our agenda to get done.  We'll show you the process we've perfected over the years.  We're always looking for more efficient ways and improve every year.

WARNING: IF YOU DON'T LIKE TO SEE BLOOD AND ANIMALS DYING, DON'T PROCEED FURTHER INTO THIS POST.

Saturday morning it was 27 degrees.  Chilly, for sure.  The evening before I had set up all of our "stations" in the butchering process.  Tricia, Russ and Benjamin and me were the Slaughterhouse four, and we started the process after morning chores at approximately 9AM. In the photo below (from right to left) you can see:

1. The Killing Cones Station,
2. The Scalding Station,
3. The Plucking Station,
4. Decapitation (Defooting) Station,
5. Evisceration Station,
6. The Chilling Station.

We'll go through each one in detail further below:

The chickens in the chicken tractor have been rolled right up to the butchering spot.  The chicken tractor has kept them safe from predators and weather over the last 8 weeks.  Each day it is rolled one length forward so they are on fresh grass.  Now, they've rolled to their final stop.

1. The Killing Cones:  We have some roadside cones that we've re-purposed into killing cones.  The bird is placed head-first into the cone.  The neck is pulled through the hole in the bottom, and the jugular vein in the neck is cut.  The chicken's heart will pump all of the blood out of the chicken.  We capture all the blood in buckets in order to compost in the garden.  The rubber cones squeeze the birds and hold them firmly during this process.  In a few minutes, the birds have bled out and are pronounced dead.  The boys normally do the killing.

We have four cones mounted between two 2x4's and this enables us to kill four at a time.

2. The Scalding Station:    We have a butane burner with a crawfish boiling pot on top that is full of water.  We have a thermometer attached that we constantly monitor.  It must be at 145 degrees.  Any cooler and the feathers won't come off.  Any warmer and you'll cook the bird.  I have a bit of dishwashing liquid added to the water, and I dunk the birds 20 dunks, completely submerging the bird up to the feet.  When I pull it out the twentieth time, I pull out a wing feather.  If is comes out easily, it's ready for plucking.  If not, I dunk a few more times.  The boys normally do all the scalding.

3.    The Plucking Station:    Some friends and I built this plucker years ago.  It really makes this job easier.  You simply turn it on.  There is a plate at the bottom that rotates.  Numerous rubber fingers pull the feathers off the bird as I spray it with water.  I count to 25 and then cut off the plucker.  If you don't leave it in long enough, there will be feathers remaining.  If you leave it in for too long, you will break the legs and/or wings.  I usually do the plucking.

4. Decapitation / De-footing Station: I pull the head off rather than cutting it.  Cutting the head off exposes sharp bones which puncture the ziploc bag you store them in.  Most times I handle the decapitation and de-footing.

Then I cut the feet off.  Heads and feet go in a bucket for garden compost.

Then I begin lining up the birds at the evisceration station.  I'll make a cut in the abdomen from which the guts will be pulled and I'll make a cut in the neck and loosen the crop.  I'll also cut two glands off of the tail.  They are certainly some nice looking birds!

5.    Evisceration Station:    Tricia is the expert eviscerator.  With surgical precision, she guts the bird.  From the lower left you can see the crop, the heart, the liver, the gallbladder, the gizzard and intestines all pulled out.

The gallbladder is carefully cut off of the liver so as not to burst the gallbladder.  We save the livers, hearts, and gizzards for eating.

6.    The Chilling Station:   The birds are then submerged into a tub of clean water.  Normally, we have ice in it, but it was right at freezing.  The water tubs chill the birds as they are hot.  The birds go through rigor mortis.  Submerging them also keeps flies at bay.  We allow them to chill for about four hours.

Here are the hard workers at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  From left to right, Benjamin, Russ, and Patricia.  They are all carrying knives.  This crew gets it done.  Teamwork personified.  We got it all done.

Fifty Cornish Cross Meat Birds butchered.  We started at 9 and finished at noon.  We are tired!  Tomorrow, join us again.  We'll show you some more including gizzard, heart and liver processing, as well as the cut up and freezing process.  We'll even share our total pounds, average weight per bird, and cost data (total and per bird).

Butchering the 2014 Meat Birds

Boucherie de Poulet (Chicken Butchering):
Disclaimer: Before we get going, I want to forewarn those that get queasy at the sight of blood that today might not be a good day to read the blog. I also want to warn you that today's post lacks brevity as I'm using this forum to capture a few notes to look at for improvement next year's chicken crop.

First off we'd like to thank the family and friends that took part in this years' boucherie.  We had a lot of help and this would've been most difficult without the conscripted labor.  I kind of felt like Tom Sawyer with painting Aunt Polly's fence in assembling the team of family and friends involved.  Remember when he tricked the neighborhood boys into thinking that fence painting is fun?  But chicken killing (at least the way we do it) is actually fun, although it is a lot of work!

My sole regret is that I didn't take more pictures of all the action.  However, butchering chickens is a "Dirty Job" and my hands get so dirty, I didn't want to get the blood and guts on my camera.  I did get a few shots and below we'll show you the process, each of the "stations" involved, and then in posts in days to follow, we'll show you how we do an 8 piece cut-up for freezing and then we'll share the actual financials to show cost per bird, average weight per bird, avg pounds of feed each bird ate, etc.  Here we go:

Here are pictures of the International Brotherhood of Chicken Slayers Union, minus two friends, Dale and Warren, who played key roles in the process, but I was negligent in capturing them in the picture.  We all look a little tired as this picture was taken once the job was done.  Once finished, we gorged ourselves on a big pot of red beans & rice & sausage that Tricia prepared for the work crew.  Both pictures are the same with the exception of the second one that has me in the place of my lovely wife.

Do they look like they're in FOWL moods?

A fun Family Reunion

As This post showed, Dale and I got all the chickens in place the night before and Russ, Benjamin and I set up all the stations so that we could get a good start in the morning.  We got out the whet stone and honing oil and sharpened the Chicago Cutlery knives until they were razor sharp and used a steel to keep them sharp during the entire process.  At around 8 am once the other chores were done, we lit the fire on the scalder and fine tuned the set-up and got ready to butcher 92 Cornish Cross Meat Birds.

Station 1: The Killing Cones:
Russ, Conner, and Benjamin were in charge of this important stage.  They would get each bird from the holding pen and bring to the cones.  Now you can order stainless steel cones for around $30 each, but on my daily commutes to Lake Charles, I find these on the side of the road that are priced much better!  The rubber holds the birds snug as to minimize any bruising.

The boys insert the chickens head-first into the cone, pull the head through, and with a sharp knife, cut the chicken's artery (jugular vein) that runs right below his jawbone.  We can kill four at a time.  We could do more, but that would cause a bottle-neck at the next station.  Here is Benjamin administering the cut.

The cut

Now most people when they think of butchering will think of a hatchet and a stump and a chicken 'running around with his head cut off.'  We don't do this.  Bleeding the bird out properly is necessary to get all the blood out of the meat.  If you don't do this, you'll have blood coagulated throughout the meat, especially at the joint areas and it affects the shelf life and taste of the meat.

This is a humane process in that the blood rushes out of the bird quickly, causing him to lose consciousness quickly and die.  It doesn't take long for the bird to completely bleed out.

Blood flowing from the jugular

Leviticus 19:26

New American Standard Bible (NASB)

You shall not eat anything with the blood, nor practice divination or soothsaying.

We have a bucket positioned under each cone to catch all the blood.  We don't waste a single thing, except maybe the cluck.  It will all go back into the garden to improve the soil in order to grow healthy vegetables this Spring/Summer.

That ain't red paint

Once the chicken has been bled out and has died, it is laid out on a bench to be picked up by the operator of the next station.

Station 2: Scalding:

This important station was manned by Dale and involves a crawfish boiling pot full of water heated by a propane burner.  I add a squirt or two of dishwashing liquid to the water.  It is an important job as the temperature must be monitored closely to keep it between 145 and 150 degrees Fahrenheit.  You can see the thermometer on the side of the pot.

The regulator on the fire must be adjusted intermittently to keep the water within the desired range of scalding.  Too cool and the feathers will not come off of your bird. Too hot and you'll cook your bird, resulting in meat that gets torn up at the next station.  The proper technique is to dunk the bird down past the joint of the 'drumstick.'  There are little feathers that grow there that you want to be sure to have that area scalded so they'll be removed.  

Scalding the chicken

Once dunked down, give the bird a little shake and then pull him up all the way out of the water and dunk him again... and again... and again...  You want to continue this process for a minute or so.  Then grab one tail feather or one large wing feather. When you can pull it out easily with little resistance, your bird is adequately scalded and ready for the next station.  You can see some of the "test feathers" at the lower right hand side of the photo below.

Pulling the bird out and about to test.

Now it is time for...

Station 3: Plucking:

This is a homemade chicken plucker made by using the plans from Herrick Kimball's "Whiz Bang" Chicken Plucker and my, isn't it a dandy?  This thing works beautifully. It was operated by my dad who sprayed water on the spinning birds, and my nephew Graham, who was the switch man.  He turned the device on and off.

All you do is drop a scalded bird in a spinning machine and spray it with water.  In 20 seconds or so, you turn off the Whiz Bang Chicken plucker and pull out a perfectly de-feathered bird!  What a time saver!  Just look at those feathers coming off with ease as it spins around and comes into contact with the rubber fingers.

The Spin Cycle

Station 4: De-heading/De-footing & Quality Control:

After the feathers are removed by the Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker, the chickens are moved to the De-heading and De-footing station along with Quality Control.  I'm heading up (ha ha) the de-heading department.  I lay the chickens on the bench, grab a chicken head between my index and middle fingers while holding the breast with my other hand and give a quick yank and off comes his head.  You could alternatively use a knife, but this leaves a sharp edge of the bone that will rip your zip loc freezer bag. Then using a sharp knife, I cut off the feet by hyper-extending the foot just a little and cutting right in the joint.  I flip around to the other side and off comes the feet, nice and clean.  We save the heads and the feet in a bucket.

Then my side-kick Carson takes care of Quality Control.  He goes over the entire bird meticulously, pulling off any little feathers that we may have missed.  He's got an eagle-eye.  Once they've passed his inspection and has his stamp of approval, the birds are certified and able to go to the next station.

Nice looking birds that have passed Carson's inspection and are ready for gutting

Before the birds move on, I'll take a knife and make a slit right where the neck meets the breast and I'll reach in and separate the windpipe and loosen the crop.  Then I'll make another slit right above the vent (rear end) and pull the bird open exposing the guts.  This readies the bird for evisceration.  Since we removed the birds from feed and grass 18 hours ago, the intestinal tract and crop is pretty much empty. This makes the next procedure a little cleaner.  Tricia has the hands of a skilled surgeon and is in charge of the next station:

Station 5: The Evisceration Station:

Tricia will take the bird, running her hand inside the cavity along the inner breast-bone, grab the heart and a handful of guts, and pull.  Everything will come out, leaving just the intestines attached to the rear end.  The heart comes off and goes in one pot.  The gizzard comes off and goes in another.  The liver is a little tricky. As the picture shows below, she's carefully cutting out the gall bladder off of the liver.  You want to be careful not to bust this as it is full of green bile.  Once this is cut off, the liver goes in another pot.  My Mom helped Tricia by cleaning the organs and putting them away and rinsing the birds and cutting table.  We'll later clean the gizzards and separately package all the giblets for freezing.

Then the knife is used to carefully cut around the rear end, removing the intestines along with it.  All the guts go into a barrel. Reaching deep inside the bird, Tricia uses her fingers to pull the pink lungs out from either side of the backbone.  A water hose is used to spray the carcass inside and out clean.  The bird is flipped over and the preening gland is removed from the little butt.  The birds are then tossed into a vat of cool water where they'll cool for a few hours until butchering is complete.

Gutting the bird

Once the butchering is complete, I'll dig a hole between the rows in the garden and dump the feet and heads into the hole and bury them.

Chicken heads and feet will grow nice veggies next year

Another hole is dug between the rows of the garden and the bucket of guts from 92 birds from the eviscerating station are dumped into the hole and buried.

The guts of 92 birds

One more trench between the rows is dug and all the feathers we gathered from underneath the chicken plucker are buried.   Blood, guts, and feathers will enrich the soil.  The chickens pooped on the grass out on the pasture and will make the grass grow.  The remains of the chickens will make the garden grow.  

Feathers of 92 birds

Once the birds have cooled, we pour off the water and ice down the birds and let them go through the rigor mortis process overnight, aging until tomorrow afternoon when we'll cut them up.  We cover them up so that predators don't come eat all of our birds.

Birds chilling and aging overnight

For some debriefing notes, the birds were the best looking birds since we started raising them.  I attribute that to good temperature control on the scalder and attention on the plucker.  We had a lot of help and things went really smoothly due to our skilled butchering crew that worked together as a great team.  A couple of changes I can think of is to move the location of the whiz bang chicken plucker to be closer to the ditch, so that water doesn't pool, causing the Eviscerating Station to turn into a big mud hole.  We also need to get better hose nozzles that don't leak.  Finally we could position all the stations a little better to improve the flow.  We continue to get better each and every time.

Join us tomorrow as we show you how we cut the chickens up into a standard 8 piece cut up.  We'll sharpen our knives once again to be prepared for cutting.