Meat bird processing procedure - any suggestions? Want to be sure meat is safe to eat.

[FunClucks]

Yea, my idea of plucking quickly and his idea of plucking quickly were NOT at ALL the same, LOL. But he's the only family member interested in being involved in the process, so I wasn't about to tell him no...

When I did it myself it took me half the time and there was a lot less talking...

 

[Cryss]

I fully realize this is a little older and the OP has probably done the deed(s). I had all the same questions. I found a video of the great Joel Salatin demonstrating and answering every question I had about processing a chicken. What a lifesaver. He even explained how and why you drain the blood completely and how to handle a gizzard ( after much protesting ). For anyone asking anything about chicken processing I highly, HIGHLY, recommend this video!

 

[FunClucks]

I fully realize this is a little older and the OP has probably done the deed(s). I had all the same questions. I found a video of the great Joel Salatin demonstrating and answering every question I had about processing a chicken. What a lifesaver. He even explained how and why you drain the blood completely and how to handle a gizzard ( after much protesting ). For anyone asking anything about chicken processing I highly, HIGHLY, recommend this video!

Thank you!!!

Always aiming to improve.

 

[Dee Dub]

So helpful!

 

[Rocky Mtn Man]

I'm new to meat bird processing, and to processing of any animal. I've processed three Cornish Cross chickens, and have 20 to go. They are 6 weeks old, so now is the time. I have a number of questions and I was hoping you guys could take a look at my procedure and see if you have any thoughts for improvement.

A) Why do we use ice to cool down the bird after scalding? If I'm just doing one chicken in coolish weather, can I just use cold water? How long should the bird rest in the cold/ice water after scalding? If it stays there too long, will it become hard to pluck? My icewater container is a 5 gal bucket.

B) What is that round dark red globular organ that looks the color of a kidney but is enclosed in a membrane? It's the size of a nickel maybe.

C) What is that pale intestine colored sac that is globular that attaches directly to one end of the gizzard? Can I just cut it off the gizzard and cut the intestines off the other side of the gizzard? How do I ensure bacteria from the gizzard doesn't pose a problem for the gizzard meat I save? Is washing it off after peeling it sufficient?

D) Total processing time from slaughter to finished bird going into the fridge is probably an hour and a half or so. Is this a problem from a bacterial growth perspective? I've had trouble finding info on this.

E) Which steps should I be particularly careful with? I already know not to puncture the gut. If I do, avoid getting it on the carcass or immediately wash it out well is the only things I know to do.



Below is my procedure for processing. Do you guys have any recommendations? Mainly want to be sure the meat is safe to eat (I'm worried about bacteria) and I don't want to waste their lives and all my effort. I thought I'd have additional help, but I don't so I've been doing 1-2 birds a day, and also I have a few questions. Trying to move up to 4 birds a day. Had one today with leg issues, so will have to process again tonight.

1) Broomstick method/English method followed by draining the blood for 5-10 minutes. It's 50-60F outside.
2) Hang it by its feet and wet it with water and some dish soap and scrub it all over like I'm giving it a bath to get off the poop and some of the dirt. Not a great cleaning cause I"m doing it one-handed, but at least remove most of the visible poop. Spray it down with the high powered sprayer on the hose.
3) Scald at 145F until wing pinfeather comes out easily. Scald water has 2-4 drops of dish soap in it, a few bubbles.
4) Plunge bird into cold water or ice bath to cool down skin and body that was just scalded. Maybe 5-10 minutes until it feels mostly cool to the touch.
5) Hand pluck bird. This takes maybe 20 minutes.
5a) Rinse bird again with sprayer, then plunge into the same icewater as earlier because it started to feel a bit warm again. 5 minutes. Re-rinse bird with sprayer.
6) Remove head, neck, feet, wing tips, peel skin off feet. 5-10 minutes.
6a) separate out windpipe and esophagus from neck, carefully peel back skin from around crop (I haven't been starving my birds as I've had to process without planning ahead much). Remove crop, cut esophagus and windpipe between crop and body cavity of chicken.
7) Open abdomen without nicking guts (this is hard!). Carefully reach inside and pull everything out. Remove gizzard as I find it, heart, and kidneys. Cut gizzard off of entrails, open it, and peel it. Rinse it off and add to stock parts bowl. Remove kidneys from entrails without disturbing bile duct. Cut veins off of heart. Save kidneys, heart, gizzard, feet, and neck for soup or feeding back to my eggers.
8) Finish removing entrails, finish cutting around vent, remove vent and (if it's not already removed) tail from bird.
9) Cut off testicles and pop out lungs. Remove whatever those are in the backbone of the bird that looks like kidney when squished out. All told, entrail removal step 6a to now probably takes 20-30 minutes.
10) Rinse out inside and outside of bird with high pressure hose sprayer. Try to cool it down some.
11) Place bird in large ziplock bag and onto shelf in refrigerator.
12) Place stock parts into regular ziplock bag and onto shelf of refrigerator.
13) Age bird in refrigerator for about three days or until leg joints move easily again. Cut it up and vacuum pack or freeze it whole.

I haven't even gotten to parting a bird out yet.

What are you guys' thoughts?

So, I have raised my own chickens before and since worked in the poultry slaughter industry for many years. I wish I knew then what I know now. There are a ton of steps you can and should do away with to make your meat as safe as possible. I will also recommend a few simple tools that will make your life a lot easier, that will keep your process more sanitary, will be kinder to your birds, and still not take away from these being backyard birds.
1) There are many ways to kill a bird more quickly and with less error than using a broomstick. Most of those methods though are meant for euthanasia rather than for slaughter though as they all inhibit bleeding. If you insist on immediate death rather than bleeding to death, the best way is still decapitation. It may not look pretty, but ultimately I am more concerned about what is more humane for the bird and not what will look more humane to people. Whether you choose to decapitate, or slit the carotid arteries and jugular veins a slaughter cone sized for chickens is a must. It helps relax the bird in the absence of a stunner. It also mitigates injuries from flapping. When at all possible slaughter at night or in the early morning hours while the bird is still not all awake as they are more calm then. Bleeding for a chicken should not take longer than 2-3 minutes if done properly.
2) If you are having to bathe the carcass because of fecal matter then you need to reassess the living conditions of your birds. Shavings/bedding needs to be kept clean throughout their lifespan to mitigate disease, and prevent foot pad burns. You can get away with not changing out the shavings completely so long as you are sure to layer plenty of fresh shavings on top, but there should not be any significant fecal or ammonia smell left when you are done. If you have pastured chickens that are still really filthy then you probably are not providing enough space for the birds to be as healthy as they could be or not adequate shelter from rain. If birds are raised properly at most a quick spray of water should be enough to remove any incidental fecal/mud/dust.
3)When it comes to scalding one of the main errors I see backyard producers make is using far too hot of water. 145 is too hot even for turkeys. Most turkeys do fine at between 136-139. Chickens you can scald at around 132. At 145 you will start to cook the skin and potentially the flesh. That will make it far more likely to increase the microbiological load and reduce the quality of your chicken. If you are handy, I recommend welding a small air line around the bottom of your scald vat with evenly spaced air nozzles. At least 3 nozzles, that you can put low psi of compressed air through. The air bubbles in the warm water will significantly improve how loose the feathers are. I would also invest in a single chicken shackle as well to use while scalding, pinning, and dressing the bird. One shackle can be hooked to a diy hanger or rack of some kind over the scald vat that will help open up the body more to more even scalding. Also the shackles are easy to clean, and in a home setting will last decades. I don't see a point in adding soap as it is just introducing chemicals to the chicken in which case you may as well buy commercial chicken.
4) Don't chill the bird after the scald, all you are doing is toughening the feathers back up and giving bacteria in the guts much more time to reproduce. As soon as the bird is scalded, pull it out and pluck the feathers starting with wings and tail, then the back and breast. It would help to have a faucet or hose running a small trickle of water to rinse hands throughout the pinning process. If scalded properly, and pinned immediately this should not take more than 30 seconds with a little practice.
5) After pinning, cut the feet off at the hock joint as these will have a lot of the potential bacteria. Rinse your hands well, and give a fast spray down of the bird just to wash away any residual feathers or other contaminants. This shouldn't take more than 5-10 seconds.
6) If you have more than one shackle this will be best for sanitation. With second shackle hang the carcass by the hocks, then with a very small poultry evisceration knife make an incision jus below the vent and at base of the tail. On a chicken this cut will extend nearly from one side of tail to the other. Then get you pair of ball tip or blunt tip poultry scissors. A knife may also be used, but they require more practice to avoid puncturing guts. Insert left index finger under skin around the vent and gently raise the skin so that you can cut skin around the vent. Then gently tug on vent out of the cavity and use other hand to guide the intestine out and away from the body. Once this is done you can make a standard J cut with the scissors or knife. Use your gloved hand or an evisceration hook to pull the rest of the viscera from the membrane in the cavity and then present the viscera pack (heart, liver, gizzard, spleen, gall bladder, pancreas) to the left or right of the breast. the duodenum and intestines will still be attached at this point and dangling. You should inspect the organs for any signs of disease. While there are many issues that can be observed, I will give you the most basic things to watch for. If the heart has white spots, has a bunch of liquid in the heart membrane or is discolored then discard it. If the liver has any green coloring discard it and inspect the bird for swollen joints, it could be something more systemic that could make the entire chicken unwholesome. If the gall bladder has been ruptured a bright green bile will be exposed. Anything that comes in contact with the bile should be discarded. Basically the heart should be an unspotted, bright color, the liver can be brown, purple, red or even yellow (high fat), but if it has black, white, or green then no good. At this point You can harvest the heart and liver, then cut the rest of viscera from the body through the proventriculus. Then remove gizzard from the remaining viscera. If keeping the gizzard it should immediately be slit oven with a good pair of scissors and rinsed out. Get all giblets into an ice bath to get the temperature down rapidly which slows bacterial growth. Inspect the lungs, air sacs, and kidneys inside of the carcass. If lungs are black this is a sign of cholera. If air sacs are white, or swollen, and/or exuding pus or purulence then this means that your bird had airsaculitis. The air sacs will all need to be removed. The lungs can be removed with a small lung scraper which I highly recommend. As long as their is no airsaculitis, and no green or off color in the kidneys you don't actually have to remove those.
7) I should add that in between each step you should be rinsing your gloved hands to minimize cross contamination. Now that the technical evisceration and giblet harvest portion is completed you will need to slit the skin up the neck carefully cutting between the neck muscle and the esophagus/trachea. This technique takes some practice. Then with you index finger carefully scrape the crop apart from the skin and pull it down. If your bird ate within a few hours of slaughter then this will likely be more messy. Finally if you chose to bleed the bird rather than decapitate, then this is a good time to remove the head.
8) Be sure to remove the oil gland from the tail with a small knife.
9) At this point just check for any bruises to trim or other things you missed. Rinse the bird with cold water thoroughly and then submerge completely in a vat with ice water. Prepare the vat in advance by filling with ice and then fill water just almost to the top of the ice ( you will need to leave enough space to put in bird without overflowing). If doing multiple birds you will need to keep adding additional ice. Also if it is a small vat you will likely need to add lots of ice. The goal is to bring the internal temperature of the bird at least below 40 degrees before refrigerating or freezing. If you are going to part out the bird or do any other additional processing prior to storage then I suggest chilling the chicken to under 34 degrees as it will warm back up slightly while you process it.
10) I realize a lot of people prefer air chill over ice/water chill, but most people do not have the adequate refrigeration to chill a whole chicken down fast enough without parting out the bird and being able to spread all the parts with plenty of space in their refrigerator to cool it down rapidly.
11) For food safety and efficiency I highly encourage you to follow the order of processing even if you choose not to use all of the same techniques as this will be the fastest way to cool the bird. In my experience it also is the least wasteful.
12) Oh, and for the gizzard, once chilled you should be able to peel the inside lining pretty easily between your thumb and index finger, and then hand remove the excess fat on the outside. Turkeys are another story. Someone mentioned cooking the gizzard before peeling. This is America and you can do what you want, but that is completely counter to your effort to make this safe. With some practice there is no reason I can see that you should not have the bird dressed and chilling in over 10 minutes from the kill step. I can do it in about 6-8 minutes, and some of the folks who have been online workers at the slaughter house can do the whole thing in about 5-6 minutes in a backyard setting.

Finally, while your process would never pass muster for commercial food safety, you are also doing such a small volume that the risk is still relatively small for illness. If all else fails make sure that the meat reaches an internal temperature of at least 165 degrees before eating.

 

[FunClucks]

So, I have raised my own chickens before and since worked in the poultry slaughter industry for many years. I wish I knew then what I know now. There are a ton of steps you can and should do away with to make your meat as safe as possible. I will also recommend a few simple tools that will make your life a lot easier, that will keep your process more sanitary, will be kinder to your birds, and still not take away from these being backyard birds.
1) There are many ways to kill a bird more quickly and with less error than using a broomstick. Most of those methods though are meant for euthanasia rather than for slaughter though as they all inhibit bleeding. If you insist on immediate death rather than bleeding to death, the best way is still decapitation. It may not look pretty, but ultimately I am more concerned about what is more humane for the bird and not what will look more humane to people. Whether you choose to decapitate, or slit the carotid arteries and jugular veins a slaughter cone sized for chickens is a must. It helps relax the bird in the absence of a stunner. It also mitigates injuries from flapping. When at all possible slaughter at night or in the early morning hours while the bird is still not all awake as they are more calm then. Bleeding for a chicken should not take longer than 2-3 minutes if done properly.
2) If you are having to bathe the carcass because of fecal matter then you need to reassess the living conditions of your birds. Shavings/bedding needs to be kept clean throughout their lifespan to mitigate disease, and prevent foot pad burns. You can get away with not changing out the shavings completely so long as you are sure to layer plenty of fresh shavings on top, but there should not be any significant fecal or ammonia smell left when you are done. If you have pastured chickens that are still really filthy then you probably are not providing enough space for the birds to be as healthy as they could be or not adequate shelter from rain. If birds are raised properly at most a quick spray of water should be enough to remove any incidental fecal/mud/dust.
3)When it comes to scalding one of the main errors I see backyard producers make is using far too hot of water. 145 is too hot even for turkeys. Most turkeys do fine at between 136-139. Chickens you can scald at around 132. At 145 you will start to cook the skin and potentially the flesh. That will make it far more likely to increase the microbiological load and reduce the quality of your chicken. If you are handy, I recommend welding a small air line around the bottom of your scald vat with evenly spaced air nozzles. At least 3 nozzles, that you can put low psi of compressed air through. The air bubbles in the warm water will significantly improve how loose the feathers are. I would also invest in a single chicken shackle as well to use while scalding, pinning, and dressing the bird. One shackle can be hooked to a diy hanger or rack of some kind over the scald vat that will help open up the body more to more even scalding. Also the shackles are easy to clean, and in a home setting will last decades. I don't see a point in adding soap as it is just introducing chemicals to the chicken in which case you may as well buy commercial chicken.
4) Don't chill the bird after the scald, all you are doing is toughening the feathers back up and giving bacteria in the guts much more time to reproduce. As soon as the bird is scalded, pull it out and pluck the feathers starting with wings and tail, then the back and breast. It would help to have a faucet or hose running a small trickle of water to rinse hands throughout the pinning process. If scalded properly, and pinned immediately this should not take more than 30 seconds with a little practice.
5) After pinning, cut the feet off at the hock joint as these will have a lot of the potential bacteria. Rinse your hands well, and give a fast spray down of the bird just to wash away any residual feathers or other contaminants. This shouldn't take more than 5-10 seconds.
6) If you have more than one shackle this will be best for sanitation. With second shackle hang the carcass by the hocks, then with a very small poultry evisceration knife make an incision jus below the vent and at base of the tail. On a chicken this cut will extend nearly from one side of tail to the other. Then get you pair of ball tip or blunt tip poultry scissors. A knife may also be used, but they require more practice to avoid puncturing guts. Insert left index finger under skin around the vent and gently raise the skin so that you can cut skin around the vent. Then gently tug on vent out of the cavity and use other hand to guide the intestine out and away from the body. Once this is done you can make a standard J cut with the scissors or knife. Use your gloved hand or an evisceration hook to pull the rest of the viscera from the membrane in the cavity and then present the viscera pack (heart, liver, gizzard, spleen, gall bladder, pancreas) to the left or right of the breast. the duodenum and intestines will still be attached at this point and dangling. You should inspect the organs for any signs of disease. While there are many issues that can be observed, I will give you the most basic things to watch for. If the heart has white spots, has a bunch of liquid in the heart membrane or is discolored then discard it. If the liver has any green coloring discard it and inspect the bird for swollen joints, it could be something more systemic that could make the entire chicken unwholesome. If the gall bladder has been ruptured a bright green bile will be exposed. Anything that comes in contact with the bile should be discarded. Basically the heart should be an unspotted, bright color, the liver can be brown, purple, red or even yellow (high fat), but if it has black, white, or green then no good. At this point You can harvest the heart and liver, then cut the rest of viscera from the body through the proventriculus. Then remove gizzard from the remaining viscera. If keeping the gizzard it should immediately be slit oven with a good pair of scissors and rinsed out. Get all giblets into an ice bath to get the temperature down rapidly which slows bacterial growth. Inspect the lungs, air sacs, and kidneys inside of the carcass. If lungs are black this is a sign of cholera. If air sacs are white, or swollen, and/or exuding pus or purulence then this means that your bird had airsaculitis. The air sacs will all need to be removed. The lungs can be removed with a small lung scraper which I highly recommend. As long as their is no airsaculitis, and no green or off color in the kidneys you don't actually have to remove those.
7) I should add that in between each step you should be rinsing your gloved hands to minimize cross contamination. Now that the technical evisceration and giblet harvest portion is completed you will need to slit the skin up the neck carefully cutting between the neck muscle and the esophagus/trachea. This technique takes some practice. Then with you index finger carefully scrape the crop apart from the skin and pull it down. If your bird ate within a few hours of slaughter then this will likely be more messy. Finally if you chose to bleed the bird rather than decapitate, then this is a good time to remove the head.
8) Be sure to remove the oil gland from the tail with a small knife.
9) At this point just check for any bruises to trim or other things you missed. Rinse the bird with cold water thoroughly and then submerge completely in a vat with ice water. Prepare the vat in advance by filling with ice and then fill water just almost to the top of the ice ( you will need to leave enough space to put in bird without overflowing). If doing multiple birds you will need to keep adding additional ice. Also if it is a small vat you will likely need to add lots of ice. The goal is to bring the internal temperature of the bird at least below 40 degrees before refrigerating or freezing. If you are going to part out the bird or do any other additional processing prior to storage then I suggest chilling the chicken to under 34 degrees as it will warm back up slightly while you process it.
10) I realize a lot of people prefer air chill over ice/water chill, but most people do not have the adequate refrigeration to chill a whole chicken down fast enough without parting out the bird and being able to spread all the parts with plenty of space in their refrigerator to cool it down rapidly.
11) For food safety and efficiency I highly encourage you to follow the order of processing even if you choose not to use all of the same techniques as this will be the fastest way to cool the bird. In my experience it also is the least wasteful.
12) Oh, and for the gizzard, once chilled you should be able to peel the inside lining pretty easily between your thumb and index finger, and then hand remove the excess fat on the outside. Turkeys are another story. Someone mentioned cooking the gizzard before peeling. This is America and you can do what you want, but that is completely counter to your effort to make this safe. With some practice there is no reason I can see that you should not have the bird dressed and chilling in over 10 minutes from the kill step. I can do it in about 6-8 minutes, and some of the folks who have been online workers at the slaughter house can do the whole thing in about 5-6 minutes in a backyard setting.

Finally, while your process would never pass muster for commercial food safety, you are also doing such a small volume that the risk is still relatively small for illness. If all else fails make sure that the meat reaches an internal temperature of at least 165 degrees before eating.

Awesome insight and guidance!!! Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and experience!

Ten minutes from slaughter to chilling? That's amazing! I will have to work on getting faster.

So you use a chicken shackle, hang the bird from its feet, and pull the viscera out the top of the bird, right? Then you set them to the side, on a counter or something to assess organ condition, then harvest the organs you will keep. Then you pull the rest of the viscera out, assess the internal organs (lungs, kidneys, air sacs), remove those, then you remove the trachea, crop, and head. Correct? I will have to try it this way.

 

[Rocky Mtn Man]

Yes you pull the viscera up and then to the side of the cavity with the feet being up and head down. On turkeys you can actually put the head into the shackle as well which allows you to pull the viscera out toward you and then to the side for presentation. In reality, where this part is so quick, as long as you have good lighting inside the cavity you can assess all of the organs within a few seconds both on the viscera pack and the other organs that are still in there. But yes I would also wait to remove lungs, etc. until after I harvest the giblets since those really need to get on ice asap. As far as setting the viscera on a counter, you could do that but as long as you have good lighting when you eviscerate the bird you can get the inspection done there which is normally how it is done by USDA or in plant sorters. Basically, with the viscera if they're bad they're bad. Pretty easy to see when something is wrong. I suppose it may take longer for someone who slaughters less frequently to identify health concerns in the viscera, so you might go to the Google learning center and pull up pictures of chicken organs with airsaculitis, septox, etc. just to get more familiar with the possibilities. I know that USDA publishes some guidance for their inspectors online. I will see if I can find some and link on here later.

 

[Rocky Mtn Man]

https://www.fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/import/compliance-guide-NPIS.pdf
Not sure if this has been brought up before in other threads or articles, but this is a very in depth guide for poultry inspection. The bulk of it will be irrelevant to your backyard, but there are some great pictures and explanations of different disease identification vs. healthy birds on post mortem inspection. There are even a lot of the pictures on there that I have never seen anything like in all of my years in poultry.

 

[Cryss]

Joel Salatin is a well known expert in all things chicken (and all things homesteading for that matter). I learned to process my birds from this video. He is respectful of the life and of its total value.

 

[Goldenwahintofboss]

A good work surface will help you out a lot!

We use carts like these

but I see a lot of people use folding tables.

ETA The carts also double as storage shelves for the processing equipment when not in use.

We use folding tables and after I ring the neck and cut the head off I hang them on the fence to bleed out before boiling. I did my first one a week ago. I was shaking after. Def takes so.e getting used to. Usually my dad will pluck and gut em. I don't mind catch and kill. It's a Def process .