Yesterday's butchering was challenging for many reasons...I wasn't prepared for it mentally but also I didn't have the fancy equipment that we would be using today. For that single reason, I skinned the chicken yesterday and would be plucking today. Plucking a chicken (or any fowl for that matter) is something that you only need to do once before you decide that you really don't need the skin that much. It is stinky, difficult, and time-consuming. One time is definitely enough.
My friend has a scalder and a plucker. When I asked her how much she bought it for, she said $750 USED! She rents it out to friends for $50 for the weekend. We, however, made a trade. She would let me test it out (since she will be processing her chickens next week) and in return, I would let her use Zeus (our Boer buck) as a stud this fall for her does. Great deal. No money out of pocket for either of us, and we both get something out of it. We will most certainly be using it again (even if we have to pay her to rent it).
When I arrived, T had everything set up, so after some pleasantries, we got to work. I selected the first chicken from the dog crate - not sure how to choose but knowing that all of the chickens would sooner or later be chosen. We had agreed that I would wring their necks and then use the hatchet to chop their heads off. T had never wrung a chicken's neck before and was impressed with my skill. Like a magic trick, she was mesmerized by the movement of my hands. It distracted her from the contorted face I made as I closed my eyes and tried to imagine that the feathers clenched in my hand was not actually a chicken. Once the nexk was broken for sure (about five or six turns), I moved to the wood block.
The chickens all still moved around after their necks were broken. This was somewhat disconcerting as our goal was a quick and merciless death. Watching them flail afterwards gave me the slightest doubt that they were truly finished. But I pressed on. The hatchet wasn't very large and it really took about three whacks to get through all of the feathers and bone. The first hit always seemed to surprise the chicken, another reason to doubt the efficacy of the wringing. It's eyes would open wide and its beak would shudder. Sometimes the wings would flap. A couple of times, the chicken would swing its headless neck around spraying us with tiny specks of blood. This job is NOT for the faint of heart.
After hanging the bird over a bucket for a few minutes to let the blood drain, we would bring it over to the scalder. The scalder was not fancy, really just a 3 foot x 3 foot x 3 foot plastic box with 130 degree water in it. Oh, and a "squirt" of dish soap. We weren't really sure what the soap was for, but the instructions told T to put it in and we weren't about to ignore the instructions. Holding on to the feet, about a five second swish up and down in the scalder was all it took. I'm not sure what you're supposed to look for, but I noticed that the skin would start to get little goosebumps and that seemed to me to be a good indicator it was ready to come out. I know that you need to leave the bird in the water long enough to open the pores but want to keep it short enough that you don't cook the skin.
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| Whizbang Chicken Plucker - not the one we used, but similar. |
We noticed a few bruises on the wingtips of the first couple of birds. I think it was from all of the flapping that they did while dying. We made a mental note to hold the wings down the next time. Once the bird was scalded, I dropped it into the plucker - a round basin about the size of a washing machine drum with three inch rubber dowels sticking out all over the inside walls. In addition to the dowels, there were tiny nozzles squirting a constant stream of water into the basin. With the bird in the basin, T flipped the machine on. Her kids were just as interested as we were to see what would happen next. It looked as if the carcass would spin around and launch out of the basin in some nondirectional macabre final flight. It didn't. It bounced around the basin over and over again. When we turned off the machine (about 3 minutes later), the bird looked more recognizable...a chicken you might buy at the store (only with bright yellow fat feet, kind of like buying carrots with the stems still on).
Off to the table. We would carfully cut around the vent and then using kitchen shears, we would cut through the bone of the tail and take the whole bottom off. After that, a horizontal slit allowed us to reach inside and pull out all of the innards. I had brought gloves, but neither one of us wore them. It was too much of a hassle going back and forth between gloves for cleaning and gloves for killing. When the chicken was gutted (and the liver and heart separated to be saved - the livers for me, the hearts for her dog), we dropped it into a bin of ice water to cool down quickly.
After one particularly disturbing death, where the chicken seemed to be looking up at me as I prepared to behead it, we switched to a different method of killing. T had used a pellet gun to the head the last time she processed chickens and she said it was much easier and certainly more definite. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the pellet gun. So we opted for the 22 instead.
I don't have a lot of experience with a 22, but I know enough to know that putting a 22 to the back of a chicken's head and pulling the trigger is not going to be pretty. And it wasn't. I would hold the chicken around the wings and breast, pointing it's head in front of it. T would put the gun to the back of its head. I would close my eyes (similar expression to wringing) and bam...I wouldn't be able to hear for a few seconds as I fought to keep the chicken's wings from flapping. T would often step on the head solving two problems, one: the subsequent zombie features that a chicken who has just been shot point blank in the back of the head with a 22 has, and two: the flailing head that inevitably rained sprinkles of blood across us both. Then, not as gracefully as the hatchet, T would cut the head off with the kitchen shears and we would begin the bleeding, scalding, plucking, cleaning, cooling process.
We processed ten chickens in about two hours...but honestly, we were having a good time talking and would stop mid-process when the conversation got good so that we could use our bloody hands for gestures. It's interesting how the whole experience, while not pleasant, was not half as bad as I had expected...mainly because I had someone there going through it with me. We thanked each chicken before killing it. We laughed at our ineptitudes. We talked about how neither of our husbands would be caught dead doing this. We shared personal experiences that other women might share over coffee. And somehow, it didn't seem strange.
In the end, I came home with ten shrink-wrapped fryers weighing right around 4 pounds a piece. I put them all in the fridge to settle for a couple of days (allowing them to go through the process of rigor mortis helps the meat to become tender) and then the ones that aren't sold to customers immediately, will go into the freezer for a later date. We have already sold three chickens at $15.00 a piece. The total cost out of pocket for us is only about $5.00 a bird.
All in all, a very successful day. I'm already planning for the next batch. But I know what I have at the top of my honey-do list now...a chicken plucker. I've already found the book that describes how to build it. It's called "Anyone Can Build a Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker." Catchy title, I know. But it looks like a winner to me.
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