It has been a frenzy of activity around here for several days. On Thursday night, I felt a mixture of Christmas Day anticipation and the dread one feels the day before a major surgery. Pit in stomach, lump in throat, sadness, gratitude, excitement.
We had set aside both Friday and Saturday to process the chickens. Kent's parents came down from Oklahoma and Kent's sister Kristin and her three sons Jared, Joel and Jesse along with their lovely friend Marcia bravely and kindly offered to help. We rented a Featherman plucker to speed the job along. It took 2 hours to find the farm of the gentleman we were renting the plucker from. He lives about 15 minutes away. Farm roads don't always make sense, especially when you cross county lines. That is another story that we won't go into.
The plan was to start processing by 7:00 am on Friday so we would have a few hours of cooler weather before the sun started beating down. While we didn't exactly start at 7:00, we weren't terribly far off from that. Okay, maybe it was an hour later. It takes a while to set things up and while I thought we'd have most everything set up the night before, that 2 hour trek to find Mr. Featherman put a kink in my plans. Even though we started later, we were fortunate because it was overcast most of the day. Except when the sky opened up and dumped buckets of rain on us. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
We all had stations, more or less, but we had a fluidity of work that allowed us to move from place to place as someone needed more help or perhaps a break from a messy job.
Station One -
The first task was to get the chickens from the chicken tractor out in the field to the "kill site" (which was the side of our tractor barn). Two or three of the boys would take the chicken brooder cage (aka rabbit cage) to one of the chicken tractors and load it it up with a half dozen chickens. That lasted about two trips. Then they decided it was easier just to load two or three chickens in deep buckets and transport them to the chicken brooder cage which became the holding area. We had taken food out of the tractors the night before so the chicken's craws wouldn't be full of food when we processed them. We did end up giving the chickens in the larger tractor some food that morning, though, assuming we would not get to them all. We were wrong.
Station Two -
The Messy Area. This was my least favorite spot. I didn't visit it often. This was where the chickens experienced the "one bad day" that my friend Ruddy talked about. We had borrowed metal killing cones to use and had also bought two traffic cones to cut down for the same purpose. These killing cones are nailed to a board or a tree (in our case, a long freestanding board on the back side of the tractor barn), the chicken is turned upside down (which calms him), his head is pulled through the opening, and a quick diagonal slash is made on the side of his throat. Sounds very nice and efficient. Except for one thing. Our chickens were too big. They didn't fit in the cones. No way were they going in those cones. After one bird experienced an unhappy moment or two and flapped himself out of the cone, we went to plan B. Good thing we watch "Poultry Processing with Russ" on YouTube so we had a plan B. Hadley ran back to the garage and got some nylon roping and they made 4 slip knots and attached those to the board. We ditched the killing cones. It went surprisingly well, and the designated chicken processor simply turned the bird upside down, slipped the chicken's feet into the knot, and made the cut, swiftly and without fanfare. We had a bucket filled with wood chips under each killing station to catch the blood while the chickens hung and "bled out." I know it sounds gross, but this is so much more humane that what happens in commercial, confinement chicken operations. Trust me.
Station Three -
Scalder/Dunker. The chicken has to be dipped in hot water to help release the feathers before it goes to the plucking station. We set up two propane tanks with 20 gallon pots of water on the stands. Once the chicken was completely bled out, we simply took him by the feet and dunked him into the hot water several times (probably not quite a minute) to loosen the feathers. We found after trial and error (and some torn chicken skins) that 150 degrees was the optimal temperature to dunk them in. You can test its readiness for the plucker by pulling at the feathers around the leg. If they come off easily, the bird is ready for the next station.
Station Four-
Feather plucking. We used a Featherman Plucker machine. It looks a bit like the tub of a washing machine with rubber fingers all on the inside of it. First, we took the bird to the plucker and laying it across the edge, cut off the head and then cut off the feet at the joints. We discarded the head but I saved the chicken feet. I know, I know, everyone gave me a hard time about my chicken feet, but I understand they make outstanding broth because they are so gelatinous and full of flavor. So that's another project to come. I froze them and will make the broth and can it later. You may think I'm crazy but I think my grandmother would be quite pleased with me if she were still alive =) You can the girl out of Arkansas, but you can't take Arkansas out of the girl.
Once you've prepped the bird, you place them one or two at a time into the plucker, flip the switch and the drum rotates and the rubber fingers amazingly begin to pluck. It has a switch to turn water on too so that the feathers drain on down through the tub and out an opening in the side. It is one nifty piece of equipment. It saved us hours and hours of work. I loved this thing.
Station Five -
Evisceration. This part of the processing reminded me of the game of Operation we had growing up. Wow. What an anatomy lesson that was! I never did get very good at it. Kristin and Marcia get the prize for stamina and perseverance in the gutting department. Jared was amazing too and could eviscerate faster than anyone. I think if Petroleum Engineering ends up boring him, he could easily get a job as an eviscerater with Tysons, ha. Gutting chickens require patience and really, just a lot of practice. You don't want to cut into the craw (which I did) because that is where any food is stored. And you definitely don't want to cut into the intestine. I think the reason for that is probably self-explanatory. Luckily we had careful cutters and our chickens fared well in this phase of the processing. We had a bit of trouble with a few chickens that were overscalded when the temperature in the scalder had reached 200 degrees. The skin had gotten too hot and the Featherman plucker ripped it off. Not a lot the evisceraters could do about that. So we have some "partially skinned" chickens. That's okay. We learned a lot from our mistakes this time.
Station Six -
Cooling. Kent's mom took this job and did a great job. We dubbed her "Quality Control." It's important that the chickens are cooled down quickly. First she put them in a tub of iced, salted water briefly to help draw out any possible remaining blood that might still be on the chicken. Next, she moved the bird to a tub of very icey water where it remained for about an hour. We wanted to cool them down thoroughly before bagging and icing them down.
We went through a ton of ice. Okay, not a ton, but I believe the final count was over 450 lbs of ice. With 69 chickens to process, we obviously didn't have adequate refrigerator space for them all so we begged and borrowed several heavy duty ice chests. When the chickens were finished in their ice water station, we checked for any stray pin feathers (quality control was strict about this but I'm sure some got away from us), cut the necks off (in the beginning, we at the evisceration table didn't think of cutting off the necks), and bagged them in heavy duty poultry bags. Except these handy dandy, heavy duty, "made for poultry processing" bags were not as handy dandy as I had thought they would be. Many of them leaked at the seams. Great. But we didn't find that out until some leaked all over my refrigerator. Another rant that I won't go into. We ended up double bagging many of them. I wrote a polite letter to the poultry place I ordered them from and requested a refund. We'll see what response I get.
We packed these bagged chickens in ice in the ice chests. We had emptied out the refrigerator in the garage (a requirement for rural living) and were able to get about 15 in there. What we hadn't anticipated was the size of these guys. We planned for 3-5 lb. birds and ended up with 5-7 lb. birds. I guess they were happy so they ate a lot.
I am pulling my first roasted chicken out the oven now, so I will get back to finish this post a bit later. I roasted it in a dutch oven in a 250 degree oven for about an hour and 45 min,. finishing up with the lid off at 450 to brown the top. We'll see how it tastes...
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