Processing Day

 Well, the chickens made it to their last day. We had a scare when a local dog, a Pomeranian, tore a hole in the coop and let a few of the birds escape. The funny thing is the roosters in the escape gang were standing up to the little dog so no damage was done. After mending the fence,  the birds had only a few days left on the pasture.Justice and I processed 25 birds on our own on Saturday. We worked as a team through every step from crating to packaging. Since these were our first birds we wanted to make sure we had all the processing steps down before our friends arrived on Sunday to help. We were bone tired by day’s end, but were completely satisfied with the entire process. 

Since I’m the shorter one of the two it was my job to capture chickens and crate them. Justice was skeptical about these, but was on the bus once he saw how quiet they became once they were placed inside. We’d withheld food in the previous 12 hours, but they were foraging up to the last moments before they were crated. With eight chickens per crate, we stacked them under a tree. This is a before shot of the cones set up. Note the difference in the grass. You can definately tell where the pen was placed on the pasture. Our friends teased Justice that he was trying to make a political sign of thier land based on the green pattern from the pen. Suffice it to say it would be REALLY difficult to write Obama OR McCain. . . but what a great prank.  Justice took this job over. I had to take the birds from the crate and place them headfirst in the cone. This is a two person job as you need to load the chicken in head first, position the bird’s head and neck in the lower opening, then hold the bird still as the vein is opened.  It was quick.  

We started with four birds per scald, but felt more effiecient when working with only three at a time. The scalder was a dream the springs that transfer the weight kept twanging with each dunk.  Justice used heat gloves (another one of my ideas) to fully submerge the birds.  3-4 dunkings and they were ready for the plucker.    In a matter of minutes, three birds were free of feathers. We found that placing them in the plucker and running it without water for the first 30 seconds really improved the process. Then Justice would add water and the remaining feathers disappeared. Everyone who watched over the weekend marveled over this particular piece of equipment. Seems that everyone has a “plucked-a-chicken-by-hand-and-I-never-want-to-do-it-that-way-again” story so the plucker was a welcome sight.  

Off came the head and legs and a dip in a cool tank to await eviseration.  This was the evisceration table. The tank on the right held bird newly plucked and cooling. The tank on the left was the cool tank with ice for the newly gutted bird to continue cooling. Since this was my job, there are no pictures. We studied Joel Salatin’s method from his book, Pastured Poultry Profits, and followed it to the letter. We’d bought lung scrapers, but I found that fingers were far more accurate in removing all of the material. This is definately a hands-on, or rather hands-in, process. It was far more interesting that disgusting.

Because we’d withheld food there was little in the crops of our birds and the intestines held green gobs of grass. It was all a very colorful process. This could make a scientist or an artist out of anyone. You had to marvel at the brillliant green of the gall bladder (which was removed intact each time) or the deep yellow of the fat or the spongy pink texture of the lungs. The organs were hues of red from deep to light and ranged from slimsy and delicate to rock hard. All very cool. One could get lost in the processes of such an interesting animal. Our friends, Ken and Stephanie, helped on Sunday so we kept all the gizzards for them. While Ken eviscerated with lightening speed Stephanie cleaned the gizzards (which were encased in yellow fat), butterflied them and peeled the hard lining. Most of them contained rocks and small stones to help the birds break down their feed, but two of them had the bright shiny nuts that had worked loose from the feeder! Chickens will eat anything! 

We don’t have a picture of the final product, but they were bagged and sealed, weighed and labled, them put back on ice. While we froze most of the birds, we did keep a few fresh and had a roast chicken for dinner a day later.  We asked our friends to be test kitchens and handed out frozen birds.  We are hoping to hear back about how our birds compare to a store chicken.