Roosters to the Freezer

Saturday morning we woke to the crowing of roosters near our bedroom window.  It has become a frequent and regular occurrence.  With a number of roosters occupying a limited space with many more hens, it's been quite a commotion.  That ends today.  Friday evening I set up all of the stations that we use for butchering: The Killing Cones, The Scalding Cauldron, The Plucking Machine, The Evisceration Station, and the Chill Zone.

Let's get this party started.  I turned on the fire to the crawfish pot and watched it, monitoring for the exact moment when it hit 145 degrees Fahrenheit.  Then I aim to keep it there.  Too hot and you'll cook 'em.  Too cool and the feathers won't come off.  I went and picked out the two roosters we wanted to keep.  They made the cut.  The others will make their places of abode in our deep freeze.  We put the first four roosters in the cones.

Head down, with buckets underneath to catch the blood.  Usually we bury the blood in the garden, but this time, my neighbor wanted it to make catfish bait with.  We slit the chickens' necks and allow their heart to pump out all the blood.  When bled out, they die.  The cones hole them tight.

Time for scalding.  We add some dishwashing liquid to the pot.  This allows the water to get beneath the feathers during the scald.  I dunk them deep into the water for about a minute.  To test, I pull a big wing feather and tailfeather out.  When they both come out with ease, they are ready for plucking.

To pluck, we simply toss the bird in the barrel, turn on the plucker and spray the spinning bird with water.  The feathers start to fly.  Pretty soon, there are no more feathers left on the chicken.

The homemade plucker that me and two friends put together works beautifully.  It literally takes of 99% of the feathers.  During quality control, we may pull a feather or two off, but overall, this machine saves us a LOT of time and effort.  You can see the results here:

Tricia is the Corporate Director of Evisceration Administration.  Armed with a sharp knife and the knowledge of how to use it, she guts the bird efficiently.  Keeping that in mind, I mind my Ps & Qs around her.

Once the birds are gutted, they are washed up and then put in a tub of cold water to continue cooling down.  After we're done, we dump out the warm water and refill with cool water.  We bring the tub inside and pack with ice.  The birds will stay on ice for 24 hours while the birds go through rigor mortis.  Then we cut them up and bag them.  Since (most) of these are small roosters, we don't know how tender they'll be to eat after cooking on the BBQ pit.  Most of these will be used this winter in Homemade chicken soup and Gumbo.  Both cooked low and slow, allowing the meat to become tender.

EPILOGUE:    In the "you live and you learn category," I'll share something with you.  To determine who lived and who died, we selected the two roosters we wanted to keep.  The rest of them would be butchered.  It was hard to count exactly how many roosters with them all moving around.  I thought I counted 8 in total.

As we kept filling the cones, I realized we had more than that.  At the end, we had butchered 16 birds.  I wanted to make sure I had them all.  On the last pass, I gathered 3 remaining birds.  The had a big comb, long tailfeathers, and the beginning of a spur on the side of their leg.  3 more roosters, I thought.  Got to get those, too.  Since they are young, they're a little hard to tell.

Once we butchered those, Tricia was gutting.  She said, "What is all this yellow stuff?"  I walked over to inspect.  It was egg.  Oh no!  I had mistakenly killed 3 hens!!

You can see all the eggs at different stages lined up within her.

This is a big mistake on my part.  This hen (and the two others I mistakenly killed) would have laid 300 eggs per year.  That mistake cost me almost 1,000 eggs a year.  I should have waited and watched and allowed the ones I wasn't 100% sure of to grow until I was sure of their sex.  This was a teachable moment for me, for sure.  

On the bright side, we added 16 chickens to the freezer and we'll enjoy the fresh, hormone-free, antibiotic free birds in delicious home-cooked meals this winter.  

The Cock's Clock is Ticking

The drama in the chicken tractor is impossible to ignore.  The crowing (loudly) commences at first light.  Then, the romance starts.  The pullets outnumber the cockerels, but they are mighty amorous.  The squawking and carrying on leads to fights between roosters for their 'harem."  Feathers fly.  Tempers flare.  The pullets seem stressed.  It's past time to do something.

I'll talk about that in a minute.  Each day we're picking up three to five eggs from the pullets.  I tried to put a nesting box in the chicken tractor, but they scratch all the hay out of it and lay on the ground.  It's time to move the hens to the pasture.  The eggs the pullets are laying are small.  It takes two pullet eggs to equal one regular egg.

I was talking to my wife about thinning out the herd (or flock in this situation).  You need 1 rooster to service 10 hens.  We have about 30 pullets and to the best of my ciphering, I think we have 8 roosters.  We plan to pick out three of the best looking roosters for keeping.  We'll introduce them to the flock in the pasture along with the biggest of the hens.  The five roosters that didn't make the cut will be butchered this weekend and we'll put them in the freezer for the upcoming gumbo weather this winter.  You can see some of the roosters in this photo whose days are numbered.  Who am I kidding?  All our days are numbered.

Once the excess roosters are processed, things will be more serene on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  There will be peace in the valley.

There will be peace in the valley for me some day

There will be peace in the valley for me, oh, Lord, I pray

There'll be no sadness, no sorrow, no trouble I see

There will be peace in the valley for me

The Freezer Has an Echo

Opening our deep freeze lately tells a story.  In the compartment to the far right which you can't see, it is full of chickens we butchered early this summer.  The chickens will last us until next summer.  However, as you can see below, the two beef compartments are empty.  There is 1 two-pound pack of ground meat - the last of it, two briskets, and not much else.  The deep freeze is so empty it has an echo.

Fortunately, we are blessed to have two bulls in the pasture.  With the Covid-19 craziness, people have been concerned about disruptions to the supply chain and lack of supply of beef.  As a result, many locals are having their animals slaughtered to have provisions on-hand in the event of an emergency.  Months ago, we called to get an appointment to have our two bulls butchered.  We found it was a four month waiting list!!  Anyhow, December 19th was our date.

The first step was separating Rosie and Clarabelle from the two bulls, Aussie and Clarabull.  The two bulls are not halter broken.  Clarabull does not have a halter on at all.  Getting them into trailer was going to involve trickery, deception, slight of hand, and raw will.  

We lured them to the gate with buckets of sweet feed.  They walked to the end of the trailer and stretched their necks out.  The bucket was placed just out of reach.  Coaxing the bull with a taste here and there, we got one foot up, then another and then pushed from behind and pulled from his halter until Aussie was up!

Clarabull required a bit more time and effort.  He fell getting in the trailer, but we were finally successful.

We closed the divider in the trailer to push them all the way to the front.  They finished off the sweet feed that we used as a lure to bait them into the trailer.

My best guess is that each bull weighs about 750 pounds, but I can't tell for sure.  Their weight sure made the truck sit down in the back, with the weight of both bulls on the tongue of the old trailer.  The trailer looks rough, I know.  It is a 1978 model that belonged to my grandfather.  I have been patching up rust holes in it with Bondo and fibreglass patching kits.  I will soon sand, prime and paint it.  I'm thinking about a navy blue color.

We drove through Jennings, Mermentau, Midland and Morse and arrived at Elliott's Slaughter House.  It sits in the country in the middle of pasture lands, rice fields, and crawfish ponds.  We watched a crawfisherman in his boat baiting up his traps.

The building itself is unimpressive.  It is a plain, white cinderblock construction.  Nothing fancy about it.  What we did notice is that on a Saturday morning, IT WAS PACKED with people.  The parking lot was full.  The interior had a line of people buying fresh meat.  You can't get it much fresher than this.

We unloaded the two bulls into the corral.  The attendant filled the water trough.  These guys will be butchered on Monday.  The meat will age for a while in coolers, and then they will grind and cut up the meat.  We will be called when it is all packaged and labeled and we'll go pick it up.

Here is a photo of the Cutting Instructions that they get from us.  I'll explain further below:

First thing is that when you bring an animal, it is ALL YOURS.  You can have everything you want, except the moo.  This sheet shows you what we get:

We want everything cut to 3/4 inch thickness.  For the front: We want the neck and chuck steaks made into ground meat, we want shoulder steaks, seven steaks, rib steaks, short ribs and brisket.

For the back: We want 3-4 lb roasts, T-bone, sirloin steaks, round steaks, shank.  We want them packed 2-3 steaks per package.  We want ground beef in 2 pound packages, the tenderloin whole.  We want the flank/skirt steaks for fajita meat.

For the debris:  We want the liver, but no kidney.  I'm not interested in the "Rocky Mountain Oysters."  We do, however, want the fat for soap-making and the bones for making beef broth.  We opted to not get the hide.  I'm sure that the items we decline, they will have a market for it all.

Upon getting a call in a couple of weeks, we'll journey back to the slaughterhouse and pick up the meat.  It will be all packaged, labeled and frozen.  We'll carry it home and re-fill the freezer.  The deep freeze will no longer echo, but will be full of grass-fed, hormone-free, fresh, natural, non-medicated beef.  The good stuff.

Chicken Butchering Day - 2020

In our eleventh year of butchering chickens for our meat for the following year, we've got the process pretty much down.  We do try to improve the process a little each year to make things easier, faster, and better.  It is hard work.  Eleven years ago we were both younger!  I remarked to Tricia, "How much longer do you think we can do this?"  We both laughed.

After exactly eight weeks of pushing the Cornish Cross Meat Birds to fresh grass several times a day, feeding them, watering them, and caring for them, we look forward to putting these birds in the freezer.  On Friday afternoon prior to butchering day as the sun sets, I pushed the chicken tractor to their spot by the slaughtering location.  I also set up all the stations.  You can see them in the photo below:
Starting in the middle, you see the chicken tractor full of 47 chickens, to the right, you can see the "killing cones," in the middle below the tractor, you see the scalding station, to the right of that is the whiz bang chicken plucker and finally to the far left, the eviscerating station, and the chilling buckets.

On Friday night, I'll sharpen the knives with a whet stone and a steel.  It is vitally important to have a very sharp knife.  It makes the job much easier.  The next morning around 9AM after chores are done, we have Russ and Benjamin manning the killing cones.  They move the live birds from the chicken tractor and place them head down in the cones.

With a quick slice to the neck, the chicken bleeds out.  The heart will pump out all the blood.  It is important for the bird to completely bleed out.  The chicken then dies.  A lot is often said about chopping the head off with an ax, but we find this to be a better method.  It seems a brutal process, but chickens must die to eat them.  And we are not vegans.  We eat them!  Nothing goes to waste.  The blood goes into the compost pile in the garden.  So do all the feathers.

From that point, we move to the scalding.  The water is heated by our propane burner we normally use to boil crawfish.  A dash of dishwashing liquid is added to the water to aid in the process of ultimate feather removal.  We monitor the temperature of the water to keep it at exactly 145 degrees - any cooler and the feathers won't come off.  Any hotter and you'll cook the bird instead of scald it.

After dunking (except the feet) the bird in the water for about a minute or two, we test to see if the bird is ready for plucking.  This is done by pulling out a wing feather.  If it is pulled out easily, it is ready for plucking.  If not, we continue dunking until the feather comes out with ease.

Then we put it in the Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker that me and two friends built fashioned after plans from Herrick Kimball of the Deliberate Agrarian website (now Heavenstretch).  One of those friends that helped build it (AJ), passed away a few years ago from cancer.  Everytime I use this plucker, I think of him.

The plucker is turned on the bird placed in it and water is sprayed on the bird while he spins.  The rubber fingers gently remove most of the feathers.  After spinning for a minute, the bird is ready.  It takes precision.  If you spin him too long, it breaks his legs.  If you don't spin him long enough, you leave feathers on him. 

We turn off the plucker and lift him up.  Most every feather is gone!  We do have to pull a tail feather or three or a wing feather or two, but mostly, he is completely de-feathered!  A wonderful contraption, the Whiz Bang is!

We then move to the eviscerating station where I pull the head off and cut the feet off.  We have a good friend that we give all the feet to so we collect them in a basket beneath the table.  I then slit the neck at the base of the breast and loosen the crop and windpipe.  Then I slice a three inch cut right above the bird's vent.  These are all nice looking, healthy birds.

Tricia is the master surgeon. She reaches in the bird's cavity and grabs the bird's heart and pulls.  The heart, crop, windpipe, gizzard, and liver is pulled out of the bird.  The organs (heard, gizzard and liver) are harvested and separated into different containers for later after the gall bladder is carefully cut off of the liver, being careful not to burst it open.  The vent is cut out and all guts tossed in a bucket for composting.  The oil gland is cut out of the tail, the lungs scraped out of the backbone/ribcage, and then the entire bird is washed real good.

The birds are tossed in a bucket for a cool-down period.  Dunking them under water keeps any flies off of them, too.  The eviscerated birds chill until we are finished butchering.  It took about 2 hours to butcher all 47 birds.  Once done, we dump out the water and replace with fresh cool water.

About halfway through, I took a photo of the waiting birds.  I bought 'straight run' birds because they are a little cheaper.  Straight run means about half are roosters and half are hens.  Roosters cost more because they grow bigger and faster than the hens.

Here is a shot of a bird yet to be eviscerated, with a container containing livers, gizzards, and hearts.

Once all done, we begin cleaning the organs.  First we scrape the fat off of the gizzards and cut them in half.  You can see below, the gizzard is full of grass.  That lets you know these are healthy birds.  Chickens you buy in the store have never had the benefit of living on grass and eating it.  We have our birds on grass from day 1 and we think they are healthier because of it.  No antibiotics.  No medicine.  No vaccines.  We dump the grass in the compost bucket and pull the yellow lining from the gizzard and we are done.

Then we move to cleaning the hearts.  We slice off the aorta, cut the hearts in half and remove the blood clots.  Finally we wash the hearts real good.

They are placed in a bucket and later mixed with the gizzards and frozen into quart bags.  We cook the gizzards and hearts together with rice.

Finally, at last, we clean everything up and put all the guts, feathers, and blood in the garden compost pile where they will decay and grow vegetables for us next year.  Everything gets used in some or fashion except the chickens' clucks!

We allow the birds to chill and go through rigor mortis.  Tomorrow I will show the next step in the process that we do about four or five hours later.  We are always very happy (albeit tired) when this job is complete!  But it is fulfilling to raise your own birds and eat on healthy meat you raised for the next year knowing exactly where your meat came from and what went into them.

Rendering Tallow

When you bring an animal to the slaughterhouse, the entire animal is yours.  You can ask for anything you want off of him and they will bag it up and send it home with you.  We always ask for the bones and the fat in addition to the meat.  The bones are roasted and boiled to make a nice beef broth.  That can be used as a base for soups.  You can use it in place of water when cooking rice to make your rice taste richer.

The fat is another thing we ask for as we make beef tallow from it.  In THIS POST FROM 2015 we take you through the steps of rendering beef tallow.  You can click on that link for the whole process, but today we'll show you the end result. 

The bull we brought to slaughter this year wasn't skinny, he was just real lean.  All muscle.  Not much fat.  A certain amount of fat is needed when making ground meat and half of him was used for ground meat.  In the end, we just had one small bag of fat for making tallow.  Tricia cooked it down on the stove until most of it liquefied and then poured it into a pyrex baking dish.  It was transparent at that point.  Then it was put into the refrigerator and it turned into a creamy white color with a tinge of yellow. 

We cut it up into chunks and put into a gallon-sized zip loc bag and then put in the freezer.  As needed, we'll pull out a square of fresh rendered beef tallow.

So what do you use beef tallow for?  Well, use it in place of cooking oil.  Tricia keeps a little ramekin of beef tallow by the stove that she uses.  Lately, we've been using it to make homemade soap.  We've made three batches so far and it has put a dent in our inventory of tallow.  Since Astro the bull was very lean and we were only able to render one pan of tallow, we'll have to contact a friend who brings calves to slaughter and see if he'll give us a big bag of fat.  Until then, we'll ration this tallow and/or slow down on the soap-making.

Picking Up the Meat

Several weeks ago we brought one of our bulls to the slaughterhouse in a neighboring town.  They butchered the bull and then dry-aged him for two weeks before cutting him up.  We don't have a scale, so we don't know his "on the hoof" weight, but we have a pretty good idea based on the receipt.  The receipt below shows a 284 pound hanging weight.  The difference between live weight and hanging weight is the blood, hide, hoofs, internal organs, lungs and heart.  A good rule of thumb is that the hanging weight is 40% of the live weight.  So this tells us that the live weight must have been in the neighborhood of 710 pounds.

You'll see there is a $0.45 per pound charge, plus a $50 butcher feel, plus a $12 fee to process the debris.  $189.80 plus taxes of $16.50, results in a total charge of $206.51.  That's a lot of money, but then again, it's a lot of meat.

After the bull was butchered, they packaged it and asked us to wait a couple days for it to get frozen solid.  Tricia arrived and there were about six wire baskets of meat ready for her.

The meat was all in a big walk in freezer along with everyone else's meat.  It was labeled and organized.

The ground meat, steaks, briskets, ribs, roasts, liver, tongue, fat, bones, and debris were individually wrapped and also put in big heavy-duty plastic bags.  They filled the trunk of the car.

The meat was moved inside by loading into a big ice chest.  Tricia weighed the individual cuts to determine how much of each we got.

Then it was all loaded into the deep freeze.  We're still in hurricane season, so we always worry a little bit about losing power, but if the worst case scenario happens and we lost power, we'd figure out a way to save it.

In separating out the different cuts and weighing everything, we got 249 pounds total for $206.31.  That's about $0.83 per pound.

This will keep our family stocked with meat for the foreseeable future.  We do have two additional bulls growing out in the pasture as well once this is gone.  While we'd rather have heifers, bulls provide much needed meat.  We enjoy the tenderness and flavor of our grass-fed bulls that have never been off the property and are free of antibiotics and medicines.

Chicken Butchering Day - 2018

Warning: If you don't like seeing blood or guts, today's post is not a good one for you.

Our Cornish Cross Meat Birds averaged 6 pounds at the time of the last weigh-in, so it was time to process them this weekend.  Process is a fancy way of saying, "It was time to butcher them."  Our chicken tractor makes it so easy to just roll them right up to where we have our outdoor butcher shop set up.  No more carrying them in wagons across the pasture.  No more ducking into the old chicken tractor that was 3 feet tall.  This tractor has a door and is 6 feet tall, so you can walk right in and grab the birds as their turn came.  The night before we work hard to sharpen all the knives with sharpening stones and a steel.  We use Chicago Cutlery knives as we've had good success with them.  We had butchered almost all the chickens when I took this picture, but I wanted to show you the ease of transportation with the tractor.  It's all about logistics.

Death Row

The first station in our butcher shop is the killing cones.  The killing cones are traffic cones hung upside down.  The chickens are placed in the cone head-first and the rubberized cone holds them tightly.  Russ gathers the chickens and brings them to Benjamin as he and Benjamin do the killing.  He administers a knife cut with precision, slicing the jugular and causing the blood to drain out of the bird.  We can kill 4 at a time and when the heart has beat all the blood out, the chicken dies.  All the blood is captured in buckets beneath each bird and will be composted into the garden.

Even the cat can't watch

Station 2 is the scalding station.  Russ and I handle this.  We get the crawfish pot heated up to a scalding 145 degree temperature and keep it at that temperature by monitoring a thermometer.  We add dish washing liquid to the water.  Once the chickens are dead, we dunk the birds again and again (about 25 dunks) or until you can easily pull out a wing feather.  That's when you know it is ready for the next station.

The dunking machin

The next station is our chicken plucker.  We built this bad boy and it is a time saver.  You turn it on, drop two birds in and watch the birds spin while the rubber fingers remove every single feather.  We let it spin until it looks like no feathers remain.  You don't want to leave it spinning too long as it will break bones and/or bruise the meat.

The Spin Cycle

Here you can see what a clean job the plucker does.  It pulls off almost every feather.  In quality control, we may pull of one or two, but the plucker really speeds things up.

The Emperor has no clothes

I line them up beside the evisceration station and pull the heads off with my hand.  You don't want to cut them as it will create sharp edges that cut the ziploc bag.  Then I cut the feet off.  Finally, I cut a slit in the neck and loosen the crop and windpipe and then cut a slit right above the vent to expose the entrails.

Chicken carcasses

Tricia does the eviscerating.  She reaches in the cavity pulling heart, crop, liver, gizzard and intestines out.  Then she cuts a 'u-shape' under and around the vent to completely remove all the guts.  There's really not much poop or stink as we stop feeding them the previous day with the noon feeding being the last.  That gives a chance for them to empty their bowels, producing a cleaner slaughter.  The gizzards are put on ice in one pot, the hearts in another, and the liver in another.

Gutting the bird

Once the bird is gutted, the lungs are removed, the bird is washed out and then is thrown into a cooling tank.  They are kept under water to keep from flies.  As the water absorbs their body heat, we dump it out and replace with cool water as the bodies cool.

Chilling out

The feet and heads go into one pot.  Some will be eaten and the rest will be composted.

Chicken feet

The guts will be composted into the garden soil, using the trench composting method.

Gut bucket

We clean up all of the tables, plucker, cones, etc. and then add ice to the buckets of chicken, giving the birds a chance to go through rigor mortis.  Later in the evening we'll cut all the birds up and freeze them individually in gallon sized ziploc bags.

Tomorrow we'll talk a little more about it.  It is good to be all finished up and it is nice to know that we have 50 chickens in the freezer from which we will feast on for the next year until it is time to butcher again.  We'll also post the statistics, showing comparisons from last year and the prior year, so we can judge our success.