Butchering Chickens

OK I admit it.
I have always taken the easy way out and had my chickens butchered by someone else. The thought of scalding; plucking; and cutting up 50 chickens has never appealed to me.

But now my one and only source has dried up so I recon I am left to do it myself.

So give me some first hand pointers.
Water temp
scalding time
ways to pluck
ect.........

Heck I am at the point right now I may just skin them rather than plucking.

the guy i helped had boiling water dipped it i think about 10 seconds pluck wing and tail feathers first then the rest

I dip in 150 degree water for about one minute. I've got a plucker which works pretty good. I hate butchering and would pay to have it done if there were someone to do it. Nothing I have ever butchered looked professional when I got done but they all tasted real good out of the oven.

John- Buy a drill powered plucker, about $40.00. Cut their throat and hang upside down. let them bleed out. Dip in 150 degree water until pin feathers are easily plucked from wing or tail. Use plucker to strip chicken. After you get the hang of it, it usually takes about two minutes to fully pluck a chicken.

Then gut and butcher the chicken however you wish. After that, I vacuum pack the meat and freeze.

As a matter of fact, I had just put one on the rotisserie when you posted this. Smells good.





Pics of the one I just started cooking with a dry rub.

john, there is a place in Robert that will process them for you.

WHERE?????????????
Any contact info.
Robert is very close to me.

Finished cooking...everything from the farm except milk and butter.

at the old hyde slaughter house just outside of Robert. email me at [email protected] and I'll get you the phone number.

Yes right across the street from Holmes diesel service.
I thought that place was closed down.

Thanks but I will just pass by there.
I will just take 190 home from work one day rather than 22 so its really not that far out the way.

By the way where do you live.
I am off 22 in Bedico.

I live off of hwy. 25 in between Covington and Folsom. They reopened part of it just to process poultry. I'll be taking a load of chickens up there on Tuesday. My sister lives out your way off of 22 in one of those new subdivisions.

you can do it yourself. get a big pot and a propane burner like in the pic. for just 50 birds, i wouldn't bother with the drill powered plucker; your hands should be just as good.

for killing- get 1 or more killing cones. usually galvanized- with a hole to let the head out the bottom. the cones are important so they don't flap the wings, potentially breaking one. one cut with a sharp knife is all it takes- some technique that comes through experience is essential there.

for scalding, a pot, burner, and thermometer, wooden stick to agitate. i think the temp/time depends in part on how the birds are raised- how many feathers, etc. but i find that 148-150 F, 30-40 sec is a good place to start. if you tear the skin trying to pluck, the water's too hot.hang the bird with a rope around one foot, and "rub" the feathers off. except for tail and wing feathers, they should all just slip right off.

takes time, and helps to have some helpers, but very doable.

what works well is to use a clean rubbermaid stock tank or similar with a hose running to overflow for the initial chill- after plucking. then, after they're all dead and plucked, do the evisceration and into the fridge.

Gregg's chicken looks good!

The older way: My mother would pull the head off. When she and her younger sister were visiting an aunt the sister wanted to kill the chicken. She hel it by the head and twirled it around a few time, thing to wring it's neck, but when she threw the chicken down it got up and ran off. My mother said she didn't want any chickens she had gone to the troug=ble to catch running, so she used her strong hands to remove the head. I never could do that, or at least I didn't need to, since I could hold the chicken by its legs with my left hand, put its head on a wood block, and cut the head off with an ax in my right hand. Never had one run off.

Scalding and plucking done by hand as described above, except we built up a blazing fire, a few sheets of newspaper would do in the summer, and singed the remaining small feathers off.

Cutting the chicken up is another process which I never did.

KEH

I will get back here later this evening with pics and details of how we do ours, right now I have some sunshine to burn.

What're you feedin them, looks like that one was poopin potatoes!

Diydave- LOL! It sure does, ....never even dawned on me when I took the pic.

Greg

My gal charges $1.95 per bird to butcher and bag them. You just can't beat that. The pricing is for Cornish crosses, other brands are more as they are harder to pluck and handle. My days of scalding and plucking are over. That smell of hot wet feathers - yuck.

We butchered about 90 meat chickens this spring. So here are some pics of the process.


We use the old butchering kettle to heat the hot water. It will hold around 15 gallons. Bring the water to a rolling boil and you are then ready to kill the first 5 or 6 chickens.


Once the chickens are bled out, take a 5 gallon bucket and put 2" of COLD water in it then top it off with the boiling water. We use a "dipper" I made to get the boiling water out of the kettle into the bucket for scalding. This will allow scalding for 5 or 6 chickens from the same water, that way the water stays clean in the kettle....which allows us to process 15 chickens on one kettle of water.
We dump the bucket every 5 chickens to keep the water clean for scalding. All depends on how dirty the chickens are and how much help you have around.



Here you see the killing cones I made up. These work pretty well, but for next year I will lower them some to make it easier to get the chickens into them. That's my wife and daughter, one helped me do the killing and the other helps my son do the butchering.




Here is where we do the plucking, feathers go in the blue tubs, one bucket of cold water for rinsing, once nearly all of the feathers are plucked the bird goes in a tub of bleach water before gutting.




Final cleaning of the feathers before gutting them, once they are cleaned and rinsed with a garden hose they go into a cooler with ice and water. We like to let them set until the next day on ice water, seems to tenderize the meat a little and gives the wife a break before processing them for the freezer.




We'll bring a trailer load of 15 or more at a time, this way we don't have to run back and forth to the chicken house each time we kill a few. Also working in the shade makes it a lot easier too. This was the first year we done everything outside...makes cleanup a bunch easier, and we don't have to worry about a mess in the garage to hose out at the end of the day.

So with our little operation we can do around 25 or 30 in a weekend morning, and spread the work out over 2-3 weeks starting when they weigh around 5 pounds and ending when they weigh around 8 pounds. We also select the larger ones each time we go for a group.

Saw on a "Wierdest Show", a Chicken that Lived 16 Months after it's Head was cut off..!!
I mean, it had nearly NO Neck left..

It ended up as a Carnival attraction..

They fed it thru it's neck with an eye dropper..

Hard to believe, but that is supposed to be documented..

Ron.

JD Farmer- I like your killing cones that you made. I used old chlorox jugs with the bottoms cut out. Yours look much handier. How did you make them? Very nice setup. I enjoyed your pics.

Greg

Bushhog Papa- You are probably talking about "Mike" the headless chicken.

I posted a link
Mike

Thanks..I didn't think anyone would believe it ..!

Not really sure I do..

BushogPapa- Here is a video about Mike.
Mike

Thanks guys for the advise.

If you're still reading this post: I gave up on plucking a while back and just skin the birds with the feathers still on the hide.

I work on a stainless table I got at Sam's and keep knives soaking in bleach water between uses and wipe the table good between birds. I rinse the birds but not with bleach water.

pictures sure make a difference, thank you

When I was growing up my mom would raise 300 chickens a year. We would butcher about 280-290 of the young ones then cull 10-15 out of the older layers. We'd butcher 30-50 of them at a time in the summer. Everyone picked them (nothing like picking chickens at 6 in the morning) before the boys hit the fields and mom and the girls would butcher them. I still remember some city cousins coming out for a visit and asking "where did that snow come from?"

Never appealed to me either. Been skinning them for a long time now. Back in 70 my folks plucked the first batch on the farm but after that they were all skinned.