Background: We hatched 12 dual-purpose chickens (Marans crosses) last summer, with the intention of keeping the hens and processing the cockerels at 16 weeks. We booked our County Extension's processing equipment (cones, scalder, plucking machine) for October, but when we got it home, found the scalder was broken! (they still owe us a free rental)
One thing led to another over the winter, so we kept them in a bachelor pen away from the hens, and ended up processing them the old-fashioned way. We bought a propane burner for outdoors and a big 8-gallon pot (like for shrimp boils) used cut-up feed bags instead of cones, and plucked them by hand - definitely not as easy as putting them in a plucker, but not as hard as we expected.
By this time they were 9-10 months old, so not ideal, but they were big.
It worked out great - most went into the freezer, but the last one we chilled for a day, then put into the crock pot on low for 12 hours, then removed the bones - easy after all that cooking. Then I put the bones back in the crock pot along with some pork and lamb bones I'd saved in the freezer, added water, and cooked that for 12 hours. Then put it all through a strainer, froze the chicken stock, roasted the bones in the oven, and smashed them up for bone meal for the garden.
Holy Toledo, I got 5 big pot pies just out of that one rooster! Could have been 6, the pies were heavy on the meat, but I'd run out of dough, LOL. As well as 3 pints of chicken stock, and about a pint of bone meal for the garden.
The pies were super delicious, way more flavorful, and really dense instead of runny, overprocessed crap like the ones available at the store.
Yes, the whole process did take a lot of work, but surprising to me since we're beginners, it was cost effective. So here's my rough cost-analysis, just for this one first rooster that we processed from hatching to eating, not counting our work, because as we get more efficient and get the timing better, it should improve:
At $16.00 per 50lbs of feed, it cost us $32.10 to feed him for 10 months.
It cost about $7.70 for the other ingredients for the pies - flour, carrots, peas, celery, butter. It cost at the most $1.00 for the propane and power for the slow cooker - I'm probably overestimating because our power is not that expensive and the propane was for 6 roosters.
So for $38.69, we got 160 oz of pot pies, 72 oz. of broth, and 1 lb. of bone meal.
If you look at these things in the retail market, Amazon has 24 7oz. pot pies for $85.02, Marie Callender's 10 oz. pies are $3.50 each, Safeway charges $3.29 for a 32-oz pack of chicken broth, and Amazon offers 4-lbs of bone meal for $7.97.
Doing the math, we got $90.37 worth of products for $38.69. Obviously not taking into account the hours of work we put in (which will become more efficient the more we do it) but also not taking into account how much raising our own food is better for our health - fresher, tastes better, and most importantly, a more humane method for the chickens than current factory-farming practices.
One thing led to another over the winter, so we kept them in a bachelor pen away from the hens, and ended up processing them the old-fashioned way. We bought a propane burner for outdoors and a big 8-gallon pot (like for shrimp boils) used cut-up feed bags instead of cones, and plucked them by hand - definitely not as easy as putting them in a plucker, but not as hard as we expected.
By this time they were 9-10 months old, so not ideal, but they were big.
It worked out great - most went into the freezer, but the last one we chilled for a day, then put into the crock pot on low for 12 hours, then removed the bones - easy after all that cooking. Then I put the bones back in the crock pot along with some pork and lamb bones I'd saved in the freezer, added water, and cooked that for 12 hours. Then put it all through a strainer, froze the chicken stock, roasted the bones in the oven, and smashed them up for bone meal for the garden.
Holy Toledo, I got 5 big pot pies just out of that one rooster! Could have been 6, the pies were heavy on the meat, but I'd run out of dough, LOL. As well as 3 pints of chicken stock, and about a pint of bone meal for the garden.
The pies were super delicious, way more flavorful, and really dense instead of runny, overprocessed crap like the ones available at the store.
Yes, the whole process did take a lot of work, but surprising to me since we're beginners, it was cost effective. So here's my rough cost-analysis, just for this one first rooster that we processed from hatching to eating, not counting our work, because as we get more efficient and get the timing better, it should improve:
At $16.00 per 50lbs of feed, it cost us $32.10 to feed him for 10 months.
It cost about $7.70 for the other ingredients for the pies - flour, carrots, peas, celery, butter. It cost at the most $1.00 for the propane and power for the slow cooker - I'm probably overestimating because our power is not that expensive and the propane was for 6 roosters.
So for $38.69, we got 160 oz of pot pies, 72 oz. of broth, and 1 lb. of bone meal.
If you look at these things in the retail market, Amazon has 24 7oz. pot pies for $85.02, Marie Callender's 10 oz. pies are $3.50 each, Safeway charges $3.29 for a 32-oz pack of chicken broth, and Amazon offers 4-lbs of bone meal for $7.97.
Doing the math, we got $90.37 worth of products for $38.69. Obviously not taking into account the hours of work we put in (which will become more efficient the more we do it) but also not taking into account how much raising our own food is better for our health - fresher, tastes better, and most importantly, a more humane method for the chickens than current factory-farming practices.
Hopefully I’ll never be so hungry that I lose this but I thank, admire and appreciate all who can. You’re right, homegrown food is ALWAYS best. Keep up the good work!
