Helping a friend, what went wrong?

[RedCanoe]

I was helping a friend process his 12 cornish crosses and he had three birds with something wrong inside.

They were 9 wks and were weighing out on the big side about 6lbs with a couple up in the 8 lb range. None of the birds were showing any signs of trouble.

We slaughtered, picked, inviserated, and chilled all the birds. He wanted them butchered into breasts, thighs, etc. When we did this, in three of the birds there was something really weird. After cutting through the keel bone to divide the breast the tenderlion and breast meat immediately adjacent was clearly bad. The meat looked cooked, and had a sort of iridescence to it. There was no off smell to the meat at all but we obviously threw away this meat.

I told him I'd look into it. Any guesses as to what was happening?

 

[DanIndiana]

Tough to guess without a picture. Was it slightly cooked from over scalding? I've done that before.

 

[PotterWatch]

I would guess you were seeing green tenders. This occurs when there is an injury to that muscle at some point during the life of the chicken. This usually happens from flapping too hard; possibly in a fight with another bird, when scared by a predator or something similar, or just a freak thing. The muscle that makes up the breast tender is encased in a membrane and is unable to swell when injured like other muscle tissue. If the swelling gets to the point that it cuts off the blood flow to that particular area of the muscle, the tissue dies. That is probably what you were seeing, an area of dead tissue in the tender. It is usually isolated to just the tender, though I have seen it once where it has spread a little bit into the breast itself. Out of the thousands of birds we have done, I have seen this 5 or 6 times. We had three in one batch where their tractor had been attacked by a predator a few weeks before processing. I imagine that the birds were freaked out and those three injured themselves in the melee.