Butchering Chickens

Usually we butcher chickens without any help.  This year, with Christine being 8 1/2 months pregnant we asked for some help.  Josh's brother, Jake, and his family came out to help butcher.  It was so nice to have the help.  The guys did a really good/fast job getting the chickens butchered, while Ruth watched the kids and helped me  bring chickens to the house, bag them, and freeze them.

We butchered 135 chickens in this batch.  We moved 165 more chickens out to the pasture pens that will be ready to butcher in 4 weeks.

The following is a couple pictures of the butchering setup.  We get better every year.  We are way more efficient at butchering chickens now than the first year when we only raised 40 chickens and had to pluck them all by hand.

We started around 6am.  The guys were done butchering around noon and the last chicken went into the freezer around 2pm.  Eight hours setup to finish for butchering 135 chickens is pretty good!

Jake is bringing a chicken to the scalder

Josh is gutting out a chicken

Jake is pulling a plucked chicken out of the plucker

The last chicken to be killed.

People always ask how we butcher chickens.  So here is the process...Yes it has improved since the days when your parents or grandparents chopped the head off the chicken with an ax and let headless chicken run/flop around the yard to bleed out!  We're a little more sophisticated than that.  I'm sure if your parents/grandparents didn't do this, if you start asking around you can find someone who was scarred by watching this kind of butchering process as a kid. ;-)

We start by loading the chickens into the 4-wheeler trailer.  This year we did half at a time.  The pallets leaning up on the side of the trailer are to detour them from flying out of the trailer.  The trailer is then brought up to the butchering location.  One at a time each chicken is caught and placed in the killing cone.  These look like up-side-down traffic cones.  The head is pulled through the small hole on the bottom and quickly sliced off with a sharp knife.  The chicken is left to bleed out for a while and then brought to the scalder.

Our scalder is just a propane turkey fryer with a kettle of hot water.  (Josh is hoping our next improvement to the butchering process will be a real scalder.)  The chicken is dipped in the hot water and swished around.  This helps release the feathers.  We need to keep the temperature around 148-155 degrees.  If the water is too cold, the feathers will not pluck easily.  If it is too hot, the skin will rip when the chicken is in the plucker.

Once the chicken is scalded, it is placed in the plucker.  This is a really nice machine that Josh and Christine's dad built.  There are little rubber fingers inside a barrel that spins.  These strip all the feathers off the chickens while we rinse them out with a sprayer hose.  A lot of old-timers that used to butcher their own chickens (these are usually the same ones with the dancing headless chickens) will ask if we spend a lot of time picking pin feathers.  The answer is no.  This plucker works so well that the chicken skins are clean of all feathers (except maybe 3 on the wings).  It's amazing!

When the chickens are all plucked, we cut off the feet, tail, and wingtips and place in one of the big black tubs of cold water to start to cool.

Once they have started to cool a little, Josh does the "butchering" or the gutting.  I've worked with every other process except this so I don't have a lot to say here except that all the insides come out so that we're left with just the meat and bones...the part we want to cook up and eat.  Josh has gotten really good at this and won't let anyone help him with this part of the process.

The chickens are then put through two more tubs of cold water to cool thoroughly.  They are then brought inside where I do a final inspection of them which includes picking out those 3 pin feathers, making sure they look good (no broken bones which sometimes happens in the plucker), and weighing them.  We then bag and freeze them.

Josh really enjoys the process.  He really likes the intense work and the final product.  I enjoy the final product a lot more than the intense work.  I'm excited to cook fresh chicken this week!

We are mostly sold-out of this batch of chicken.  We plan to butcher again on July 4th and 7th.  If you are interested in purchasing chicken, please let us know.