Well, we did some today. It was a long day. The processing went well. We processed thirty hens. It was the first time I had processed birds en masse versus the occasional bird or two here or there. We used a 30 gallon stock pot for a scalder and an EZ Plucker that I bought a few weeks ago. It was just my 17 year old son and I, and I think we were done with the processing in about 2.5 hours.
I cleaned out the scalding pot and threw all 30 birds in there to cook. The birds were a little lighter than I thought and dressed out at 2.5 lbs. At that size all 30 fit in the pot with just a little room to spare. It took an hour to bring the pot up to a simmer and then we simmered the birds for an hour. We removed them from the water onto large aluminum cookie sheets, let them cool for a little bit, and deboned them.
It came to 22 lbs of meat which went into 18 quart jars. I figured the quart jars would fit about two pounds of meat, but it it was actually 1.25 pounds per jar. I processed them all at one time in our large pressure canner and finally shut off the propane a couple of hours ago.
I haven't tried any yet, but it looks good... I think a gallon of chicken grease has soaked into my pores and the house smells like a chicken soup factory, so I'll hold off on trying it for a little bit.
As I said, it was a long day (we still have to catch and load up 900 more hens when the truck comes at 9 PM tonight), but we did put up 22 lbs of chicken. It seemed like a lot of work, but then it was just me and one helper. I kept thinking about my grandmother canning 6 or 7 jars at a time on her gas stove in a tiny farmhouse kitchen and was thinking that all in all we did pretty good.
