Inedible

[SteeleFaithFarm]

I want to know what people do with the inedible parts of the chicken after they process a bird. Has anyone found some good uses for the byproducts? I figure if I can collect and dry the blood it would make good fertilizer. What can you do with the feathers or initials? Dog food? Anyway let me know if you have any clever uses for your leftovers.

Brad

 

[HEChicken]

• Feet. I clean them, skin them, then add to a pan and cover with water and perhaps and onion or carrot or two, and make the best stock out of them.
• Heads. After plucking, they go in another pan and I make more stock out of those. (After the stock, the skin peels off and the brain can either be eaten by us or fed back to the pets (dogs and chickens). Same with the tongue.
• Innards. The actual intestines, I dispose of along with the bile duct. Although the dogs might eat them, I find the smell distasteful.
• Organ meat including lungs and gonads. Can be cooked and eaten by people, but I give it to the chickens to eat, either raw or cooked.
• Gizzard. Slice along the "seam", turn inside out, removing the internal layer complete with contents. Place in a small pan, cover with a bunch of sauces/seasonings and simmer for hours. This is considered a delicacy in a number of high-end restaurants.
• Tail. Pluck and saute. We call this the "parson's nose" and it is absolutely delicious.
• Feathers. I have considered trying to keep them and use to make a feather pillow or comforter but generally they end up wet and icky and I wind up tossing them. I've heard the saddle/hackle feathers can fetch high prices by fly fisherman who seek them for fly-tying.

 

[ShortAnda]

I like your idea of using the blood for fertilizer - I think I might do that. I watched a documentary yesterday called Dirt! and in it they showed how they were composting fish parts. I assume the same can be done with chicken parts. If it were me I would give almost everything to our dogs. The croups we could eat. In Mexico we will boil the combs - peel them, fry them a little with seasonings and make soft tacos with salsa, cilantro, fresh red onion and lime. I read somewhere that it's very beneficial for dogs to eat the full innards of herbivores because it provides them with a source of greens that they need in a form thats easy to digest.

 

[smilingcat]

gizzard, heart and liver eaten. The rest goes into compost pile. I mix with lots of used wood shaving litter from the run so as to balance out the nitrogen and carbon content. This helps to minimize the smell of rotting animal. It'll decompose quickly and makes great compost. Return it to earth.

 

[SteeleFaithFarm]

These are all great ideas. My wife and I hate to waste anything. So, if we can make use out of as much stuff a we can we certainly with. A are definitely going to add the feet to our stock pot. Does anybody know if feathers compost?

 

[Mingming]

Feathers are great in the composter! Feathers are protein (hence the way to solve feather picking is to up the protein in the feed) though so don't leave them out in the driveway in a plastic bag on a hot day like I did unless you want to attract maggots . But they still composted just fine and fairly quickly.

 

[TonysChickens]

Chicken blood (along with pork blood) can be coagulated with some water and can be cooked and cut up like tofu. It is actually edible and for some, tasty. Stir fry with soybean or mungbean sprouts, green onion and ginger is the classic way to do it.

Intestines = Chitterlings, do a stir fry like the above also.

Many ways to do chicken feet, find it in asian recipes Dim sum anyone?

Heads are no good except for making broth.

Innards like liver, heart, gizzard, all makes a nice stir fry again.

feathers can be composted for fertilizer.

 

[Major_in_MS]

I've heard about putting the innards in a cloth sack and letting it get ripe, then sinking it in a lake to bait the area for catfish. I have not tried it yet, but since I live on a lake I put what was left from the last chicken I butchered into a plastic bag and into my freezer.

 

[HEChicken]

Intestines = Chitterlings, do a stir fry like the above also.

Do you rinse out the contents and refill? Because I guess the off-putting part for me about the intestines is that at least at one end, they are only seconds from being flushed out of the bird as poop so that's really not something I'm interested in eating. Even my dogs didn't seem interested and they love to go around and snack on chicken "nuggets".

 

[wsmoak]

I didn't like throwing them away so last time I tried burying the offal. I used post-hole diggers and got at least two feet down... and something came and dug up Every Single Hole. Armadillo? Raccoon? Coyote? No idea, but I had to haul and rake a bunch of dirt to fill in half a dozen holes. I won't be doing that again!

One of the canning blogs I follow just had a recipe for dog food, so I'll probably cook up the livers, hearts and gizzards next time and do that. I'll probably just freeze it instead of pressure canning it. The intestines and feathers will go in the compost pile, well buried, and with a wire cover.

-Wendy