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.
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