Age processed birds...WHERE?

[hensonly]

I'm glad I know that birds need to be aged in the fridge for a few days before using or freezing...but WHERE?? Where am I going to age the 30 or so birds we plan to get this spring? If I have to buy another refrigerator to age my meat birds, it'll make them awfully expensive chickens!

What do y'all do? I'll be having someone else process them, so they'll all be done on the same day...eek! Would coolers full of ice do the trick for those that won't fit into my fridge?

 

[CedarRidgeChicks]

We put them in a cooler with salt, a little water and lots of ice.

 

[DawnSuiter]

Not sure what your butchering... but AS FAR AS I UNDERSTAND IT...

The point of aging the meat is to allow it to become more tender than it would be if freshly caught, killed & frozen. I believe this GENERALLY applies to older meat, such as in dual purpose breeds or even fresh caught game. It becomes tender because "digestive enzymes" are released that begin to break down the tissue as it cools but is not frozen.

If you are butchering 6 week old meat birds, they wouldn't be tough anyway... therefore... no need to age them.

 

[Big George]

I had 27 last year and did them in two batches a week or two apart. What did not fit in the fridge went into a cooler with water ice and a little salt. Fifteen turns out to be a good mornings work anyway. Good luck.

 

[saddina]

Part them up. Don't try to cram 30 whole chickens in your fridge, get a serious pair of poultry shears and a pair of bolt cutters if need be, and break them down. Now you can store them as breasts and leg quarters instead of whole birds. Much more efficient.

 

[Mac in Wisco]

I'm curious as to how those that process a large number of birds actually freeze them. I would think that you wouldn't be able to properly freeze a couple hundred pounds of birds at once in a conventional freezer. They can only take a certain load at once and piling them in there without proper circulation can cause spoiled meat. We do have one freezer that has a quick freeze button to turn on the compressor for 24 hours straight when adding large quantities of food, but I'd be leery of loading a freezer with 150 lbs at a time (30 birds).

 

[dancingbear]

Quote:
If these are Cornish X or another broiler type, (red broilers, colored rangers, etc.) and are the usual age for slaughter when you get them processed, they really only need to rest long enough for rigor to pass. That's 4 hours, according to most sources, overnight to be on the safe side. Whatever you can't fit in the fridge, you could pack into coolers, in ice water overnight, and freeze the next day. Even with older birds, rigor would be past by then. With those, you could age them a few days when you thaw them. Depends on how you're planning to cook them. (The older birds, not young broilers. The broilers will be tender anyway, so long as they got the 4 hours to get past rigor.) If you're gonna cook them in the crock pot, or pressure cook, I wouldn't worry about aging beyond the initial 4 hours.

We have a couple of chest freezers, each about 5 ft long, and we put about 200 pounds of pork in through the course of one day, (as we got it cut and wrapped) when we butchered pigs. We already had a lot of food in one, it was about 1/3 full, so we added to that one until it was full, then started on the other. It was all frozen solid by the next morning. the second freezer didn't have nearly as much all at once, most of it went into freezer #1.

Anyway, if you have a chest freezer, it's pretty easy to spread the packages out, so there's room for the cold air to circulate. You could put in 15 birds in the morning, wait until night, and put in the rest. Check to make sure the first batch is frozen before you add the next lot. If I had to put birds in coolers and the fridge, I'd put birds from the coolers in the freezer first. Even if not all could go in at once. Fewer coolers to keep iced while you wait.

 

[Brunty_Farms]

Quote:
I have to rent space if I ever need to freeze anything... which is why I like to sell them that day or early the next morning. Otherwise It's a pain. But they go onto these movable racks so that there isn't any bird touching each other. It's a blast freezer that freezes them in about an hour and a half. I was freezing whole turkey's (16 lbs in about 4-5 hours) I pay $50.00 / month which includes use of the blast freezer and I get a 20x20 walk in regular freezer to hold my product in the winter months.

The blast freezer is at -30 degrees. It's so cold that you try not to breathe when your in there. I find that by the time I take a cart in... go fill another one up, and take the second in the freezer that the first one already has a frozen coating on the top of the bird.

If I do it at home, I try to stager what I freeze. I only put a few chickens in the freezer... let them freeze all the way than put more in. Otherwise it takes them days to freeze all the way through.

 

[dancingbear]

Quote:
Wow, that's not a bad deal. I tried to find rented freezer space here, the only one I found was something absurd like $190 a month, just for a little commercial-style freezer about the size of the ones I have. No blast freezer or anything like that. We decided to stagger butchering, to give me time to cure bacon, render lard, and cook down soup/scrapple bones to make more space.