Ever had a couple of chickens to pluck, and don't want to spend hours pulling out the pin feathers one by one???
WAX IT!!
OK... I had to share this... ZykloniaDark-GothikRanchr had posted something about this in another thread, and as I had just spent the last 3 days doing fine-detail plucking on 17 meat birds, I decided to pick Delight's brains on it. I cannot take the credit, but we did it today on three roosters (yes, my extra lt Brahmas are no more) and I was amazed at how easy it was. I decided to document it for other "visual" learners. WAX IT!!
You will need:
~a chicken
~Water
~Paraffin wax
~A large pot for the water, just warm enough to melt the paraffin wax, and large enough to dunk a whole chicken.
~A large bucket, or another pot, with ice cold water in it, deep enough to dunk a whole chicken.
The paraffin we bought came 4 chunks to a box for around $1-2. Melt 1 chunk in the water.
While that is melting, dispatch your chicken in a manner of your choosing. Ours seem to lose their heads more often than not.
Rough pluck by removing the large wing feathers, tail feathers, and a few handfuls of the back and chest feathers.
Take your chicken to the pot of wax, and dunk. Hold for a 20 count. Remember, the water should not be HOT, just WARM.
Take your chicken to the bucket (here we only had a cooler left to use) of ice-cold water and leave it there for several minutes.
We dispatched the next chicken and waxed it in that time. When we put the 2nd chicken in the ice-bath, we took out the first one and started plucking.
I took my hands and pressed around the chicken, breaking the wax into pieces. Then just start peeling it like an orange.
Afterwards, I rinsed the chicken to get the rest of the wax off (as instructed ) and once indoors, I used small needlenose pliers to remove the last few little feathers that the wax missed, and finished removing the neck. Running a butter knife against the remaining pinfeathers removes most of them easily - kind of like scaling a fish. I would say all of that took maybe 10 minutes, when I've been known to spend 2 hours plucking the pinfeathers off of a chicken.
For each chicken, melt a new block of wax. If you melt it all at once, it will all come out with the first chicken (trust me on that!). This is good for a small number of chickens, but I could see it getting expensive if you have a LOT of chickens to do. We're in the process of gathering parts for a Whiz Bang plucker, but for the 3 birds we did today, this worked fabulously! Thank you, Delight!!!
And thanks to hubby, for taking the photos!
