**Sort of poll** How do YOU process your birds?

[PineBurrowPeeps]

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[dirtdoctor]

Great thread, Last week we had two roos that needed to go!!! they were plucking our hens something fierce, well, we broke the neck, then cut, drained, and plucked, it was getting late and for the clean out of the body cavity i had a brillient idea! scraping all those bits and pieces, so i inserted the pressure washerin the neck hole, (low pressure at first) and blew the rest of the throwaway pieces out its Six o'clock. Really was fast.

How ever, we had to chase and round up these critters first, so the adrenalin in the meat well, its best to get them relaxed first. We will grind the meat for sausage. I roasted it and it was soo tough. Boy wonder suggested that maybe next time we stick to the soak in Cokea cola for a couple days in the fridge. We all agreed,

If you want rubber tire tough chicken, then do it the way we did.

does the boiling water dip really speed things up?

Best to you all,
Jack

 

[greyfields]

Drop them off at a processor.

Pick them up from the processor.

 

[Leslie In North Pole]

We slice the throat with a sharp knife and definitely use cones when butchering in the winter as we do that in the garage and want to keep the mess down. (Nothing like dressing a turkey out at -40 for Thanksgiving) In the summer, we hang them upside down above a children's swimming pool to bleed them out, slicing the veins and arteries after letting them hang for a minute or two. They calm down when the blood rushes to their heads.

The first couple of times we did it, we tried to read up on it and still found it challenging. I recommend reading up on it, using a very sharp small knife, and only attempting 5 the first time. It seems like a lot of work the first time because you are so busy making sure you are doing everything correctly.

We found after doing our first couple that going back and studying the throat during processing really helped us see better what we were wanting to cut and made our future cuts far more effective.

My dad would process the birds via sharp axe and a log or board with a pair of nails about inch and half apart, placing the neck of bird between them, pulling on the feet to straighten the next, and doing a quick hard chop, and then tossing the body to bleed out while grabbing the next bird. We don't do it this way as don't like watching them flop about.

We skin most of our chickens and ducks and pluck our turkeys. If you pluck, we heat our water 150-160 degrees and add a little dish soap to cut through the oils and allow the water to loosen the feathers. Always allow them to "rest" in a frig for 24-48 hours to allow the muscles relax or you will have have tough meat. I found that with standard roos, that when I fried them up, they were tough but if I reheat the leftovers the next day, they would become tender.

Let us know how it goes the first time, regardless of how you choose to process your birds and write down any issues that arise so everyone can help you learn.

 

[tuskajones]

I butchered 12 birds by myself for the first time over a period of 3 days.

I killed the first two trying to chop their heads off with an axe as they were hung against a tree trunk--very hard to get a clean cut and not miss a few times. I did the rest making a vertical cut on both sides of the neck. This was a much better way for me to do the deed quickly and humanely. I read somewhere to aim for the back of the brain just behind the jaw with a fillet knife and that helped me get it right by the last few birds. The birds seem not to struggle as much with the latter method but still be prepared for some flapping and muscle contractions and of course they still have their heads so the eyes are open. When they were still, I cut the heads off with a pair of kitchen shears. I hung them from a tree in the woods so I didn't have to deal with blood clean up. I had another person do my first 8 birds and he did not bleed them out and I can really tell a difference in the meat. He snapped the bird's neck with broomstick, plucked and them processed. I much prefer the bled out meat.

I had a very basic set-up but it worked really well for me and I don't think I would change anything for the next time--maybe except to get a whizbang plucker!! I found an old hollowcore door that I covered in a plastic tablecloth and set it on top of a trash can on either end. The trash cans were then set up on a galvanized tub to raise the whole thing to a working level height. It was then easy with the trash cans right there to dump in the guts after eviscerating. My cutting tools were a pair of kitchen shears, a fillet knife and a knife sharpener. I also bought a LARGE aluminum cookie sheet to do the actual eviscerating on. That way I had a hard work surface that I knew I could clean easily with bleach and water. It also contained the guts as I was working on the table.

I attached a tarp on the ground behind the setup so I whatever I hosed off the table or bird went down the tarp off into the edge of the woods. It was only 10 feet or so away but it was nice not to have a puddle of chicken waste at my feet.

I had my cooler of ice water next to the table and plopped them in when they were clean. I did 2 at a time and the plucking was the worst part. It just took me forever to get the birds clean.

I also prefered the birds to have some food in their crop. I had a few birds with an empty crop and found it more difficult to get my fingers around it to yank out.

Good luck with your birds!

Kelly

 

[coffeelady3]

Quote:
Greyfields,

You are WAY too funny!

 

[pdpatch]

Since we haven't tracked down any processors yet we did three our self's a couple of weekends ago.

bird 1. Cone and knife, but the bird was so tough and dull knifes I finally just jerked it out of the cone and used a meat clever to chop the head off. I put a lot of dents into the the new meat clever.

bird 2. Cone and knife With sharpened knifes and I dug out the old 50's vintage set of knifes and clever. Worked much better but I made the large cone wrong. so the bird almost got out. the 21 x 11 x 4 11 inches cone I made was way to short instead of 11 inches tall may 18 to 20 would work better.

bird 3. Cone and meat clever. Using my 50's vintage meat clever, that would qualify as a hatchet. I whacked the head off quickly while the bird was in the cone, but the cone is just all wrong. I had to have some one hold the legs of the bird while it was in the cone. The meat clever cut large chunks of the plastic cutting board I was using when removing the legs.

The new knifes was from a set that was made and sold as a hunters knifes set at a major discount store. I got them for christmas a couple of years ago. They were in no way very sharp.

A good fish fillety knife works well for cutting the neck and when you have to stick the point of the knife in to the body.

Tom

 

[SandraMort]

Is that very expensive?

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[reallemons1]

I cut the heads off with a very sharp buture knife while the bird is hanging by the feet.
All of then scraps and feathers go in a barrel and are burried in the garden. We hose down the blood into the grass when we're cleaning up. The grass must like it because it grows really pretty and green afterwards. How many you can do in a day depends on how fast you pluck.

 

[WalkingOnSunshine]

We did three dual-purpose breed roos yesterday just to see if we were up to the challenge.

DH put them into cones* and cut the throat on two, and the head off on one. The one with the head cut off made a big splattery mess, so we will just cut throats from now on. We also had one fall through the cone because the hole was too big, so we luckily had a second cone with a smaller opening for the next one. Also, be sure that you tie the feet together and hook them on to something (we used a fence post) so that they don't wiggle out.

We let them drain onto the ground by the compost pile and then pulled some of the compost over it to keep predators away.

I skinned them. The first one took me an hour and a half, the second one 25 minutes, and the third one 7 minutes. I was worried that I couldn't do it, but once they were dead, they were really just meat.

Our only big mistake was that one of the roos saw another one being killed and FREAKED OUT. I felt bad for him. Next time, we won't do it in sight of the chicken tractor.

It was OK. Not fun, but OK. Now I have to figure out what to make out of these three skinny roos.

*ETA: We used those orange traffic cones tacked to a fence post that we pounded into the ground. We cut a few inches off of the small end of the cones to make them the right size. That's how we got one that was too big the first time.