I always leave skin on mine as well, for the same reason. You will loose the fat layer if you skin them. Heritage turkeys can be ready to butcher starting around 6 months, which is 2 months longer than the broad breasted birds take to finish. If you butcher your heritage bird at 4 months, they don't have the time to put on the nice layer of fat. To be honest, the industry butchers the broad breasted birds too soon, I think, because that fat layer even on the broad breasted gets better at 6 months if you can get them to survive that long. I have a great big chest freezer, and I usually butcher around thanksgiving and give a few away to close friends and family as gifts for helping me out during the year, since I am asset rich and money poor, it is one thing I can do to help out people that help me. A few people buy turkeys and then I butcher them too, to help out with the feed costs, so they don't have to butcher their own turkeys. Getting the right scald temperature makes a big difference, and I invested a few years ago into a plucker that could handle a turkey. It took me a while to afford that size of plucker, but 30 seconds of plucking is so nice. My family forms an assembly line and we get them all done in a day and set up a big water trough as a cooling tank with lots of ice, we chill them overnight in the tank to get them through rigor mortise before we freeze them or cook them. If we cook them, we let them age 3 days after butcher in a cool place to get real tender. The skin on a turkey that has been raised well and is healthy is really hard to beat flavor wise. All it takes is a little butter and salt, the butter gets the salt to stick. You can stuff a bouquet garni in the body cavity to get some herbal infusion, if you want. The drippings make heavenly gravy.What age it good to process jakes/toms? Are toms like roosters where they get super tough as they mature? If all of my birds survive to maturity I know I will have too many males so I do plan on butchering any extra ones.
That is amazing! Butchering 30 turkeys seems like a huge undertaking. Did you do them gradually or all at once? Do you scald and pluck and freeze whole? We've been skinning our roosters and fileting out the breasts and cutting off the leg quarters only. It has been much easier than scalding and plucking. They freeze better that way too and don't take up as much room in the freezer. I have a few more broilers to process and I may scald, pluck, and freeze them whole for use as roasters. We've been doing a few each weekend and throwing them on the grill. Had two for supper last night.