Scalder Burner?

[cbailey]

Hello... i have raised turkeys in the past and had them processed at a local processor. I want to start to raise meat chickens next year and process them myself. I am in the process of building a whizbang picker. i am curious what type of scalder equipment is recommended. i have searched the web and there are many solutions and wide range of prices. i am considering a 60K btu propane burner with a 20 gallon pot since i still want to raise a few turkeys also. any suggestions? when i search there are a number of different burners that come in that size, some quite a bit larger. i am trying to determine if a jet burner is better than a banjo type burner, etc.. thanks so much.

 

[iwltfum]

We have been raising about 20-40 Turkeys a year in addition to our meat bird operation and we just use a turkey frying set up - but with water instead of oil - for scalding both chickens and turkeys. We have been for a good couple years now and it seems to work well. We raise our turkeys to 12-15lbs - any bigger and we would need a bigger scald pot, but for now we are still just using a fairly wide 10 or 12 gallon pot - same one we use for the chickens. We found that "real" processing equipment is generally cost prohibitive when applied to our small scale (about 200 birds a year) so we got a decent plucker and some nice professional processing knives and got used or repurposed equipment otherwise.