Meat Chicken Processing Day

Follow along on meat chicken processing day. Raising and butchering our own chickens isn’t the easiest way to get good meat, but it is a great way to get healthy meat that we know is safe.

If butchering chickens isn’t your ‘thing’, that’s ok…it isn’t my ‘thing’ either. I don’t think anyone really enjoys butchering. But, it is one way we can ensure that our chicken is the healthiest and safest chicken we can eat.

And, in that sense, it is a great day as well. We are excited to harvest the meat we have worked hard to grow and to fill our freezer! And we are pleased that we raised these chickens very humanely and gave them a very good life. Happy chickens, means good meat.

Death is a part of life

By raising our own birds we can control not only the feed but also the environment and the humane killing. Killing these birds isn’t taken lightly, but we do accept the fact that God has given us dominion over the birds and beasts and that they were, in part, created to feed us.

As Joel Salatin, of Polyface Farms says, “There is a necessity of death in order for there to be life.” People who didn’t grow up with this are removed from death and don’t often understand this profound connection of death and life, but it is there.

So, if you want to know more about our day…read on. If it isn’t for you, I encourage you to stretch yourself and take a look. I promise, there is nothing gory and you might find out it isn’t so bad. But, if not, I’m ok with you cutting out now.

Meat Chicken Processing Novices

This post isn’t really meant to be a tutorial or a ‘how-to’. It is more intended just to share with you a day in our life, how we butcher, the mistakes we made and hopefully empower you to go and give it a try.

We know we are novices, who only do this every few years. So, you won’t see any real slick technique or amazing tips. It is simple and crude, but it fills our freezer. And that is the goal. I will share our mistakes and what we learned along the way. Always learning here on the farm!

Meat Chicken Processing goal

Our goal was to put up 30 chickens and 9 large turkeys this year. If you were around earlier this spring then you may have seen my post about our new chicks that were eaten by rats the first night we got them. Eleven gone in one night. That was a hard and expensive lesson.

So, this won’t be enough chicken for us this year and we will either have to get on some fall chicks or resort to buying some chicken. We do also have 8 (one died) turkeys to butcher in the coming weeks so that will help our poultry supply.

Our goal is to do this every year and never buy chicken from off the farm again. You would think it would be easy because we live on a farm. But, like everyone, our lives are full and it is more time-consuming to raise and butcher chickens than to purchase them. It is a big process to grow and raise all our own food.

Supplies needed for Meat chicken processing

1. Killing: sharp hatchet or knife; board and tall bucket OR killing cone
2. Scalding: Propane burner and large stock pot
3. Hose with cold water and spray nozzle
4. Feather plucker
5. Cleaning/Triming: Table and good sharp knives and buckets for salvageable parts and waste parts
6. Cooling: Large tub or ice chest and ice
7. Washing/Bagging: Sink, large freezer bags or shrink bags for chickens
8. Chilling/Freezing: fridge space for two days, manual defrost freezer for long term storage

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Basic Meat Chicken Processing Steps

Killing & bleeding

We didn’t have a killing cone and since we were only doing 17 chickens we didn’t bother to borrow one. So, we just held the chicken neck stretched on a board and dispatched its head with a hatchet or a knife and then quickly put it upside down in a tall narrow bucket to let the blood pump out for a couple minutes.

If you have access to a killing cone that is really slick and is a great choice to help this process go smoothly.

Scalding

Once the blood is all drained out you need to scald the chickens to get the feathers to release. We use a small propane burner and large stock pot for this. We put them in 145° water for 45 seconds to 1 minute. You can test by pulling a feather and seeing if it comes out easily.

Plucking

We borrowed a large home built chicken plucker from a friend for this part. It was large enough for 3 chickens at a time. After scalding gently toss the chickens into the plucker while it is running, and spray a little cold water over top to help the feathers go out the bottom and not clog up the plucker. Run them for about 25 seconds until clean.

If the scalding is done at the right temperature the chicken should come out of the plucker very clean and with all the skin intact. If they are scalded too long the skin can tear. We had trouble with our first several not coming out as clean as they should have. We put in a call to the owner of the plucker, tried his advice and they still didn’t come out clean.

It was then we discovered the thermometer we were using to test the scalding water temperature was 30° off and the scalding water was too cool. By the time we got our last batch of chickens in the plucker it worked beautifully. Haha! Guess that is how it goes for novices. We did a lot of hand plucking that day, but we learned a lot for next time!

Gutting & Trimming

I let my farmer men do all the gutting and trimming. The boys didn’t seem to mind this part and all learned a lot. They will all be skilled providers when they grow up!

Being in 8 long weeks of harvest, then going camping for 3 days and then immediately coming right home to butcher we didn’t have a lot of time to research all the processes again before starting. So we brought out our handy and well-worn Encyclopedia of Country Living book by Carla Emery. book to the pasture and read as we went. Basically, you have to trim off the feet, cut out the vent, organs, and lungs.

Looking back, it would have been helpful to have watched a few YouTube videos before starting to refresh us on the process. If we had we also might have learned more about saving the organs, but we didn’t and we ended up feeding those, with the other waste, to the laying hens.

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Saving the feet – we messed this one up!

One thing I remembered just as they started cleaning was that I wanted to save the feet for bone broth. Chicken feet have a great deal of collagen that is super beneficial in bone broth.

Having never saved the feet before and having failed to research ahead of time the best way to go about this, I just asked my farmer to save the feet as he butchered. I then went back to washing and bagging birds as he killed and cleaned them.

Last, I scrubbed up the feet really good and put them on freezer trays to freeze individually for a couple of hours before bagging so I could pull them out two at a time.

Later, I did some research and found out I needed to skin the feet before freezing. Woops! So, now my option is to scald and skin them as I pull them from the freezer to throw into the bone broth. Doable, but definitely not the easiest.

After further research and watching some videos (listed below) I learned that the easiest way to handle the feet is to scald them on the bird, then they peel right off in the plucker! Wouldn’t that have been easy! (Always learning things the hard way!)

Instead, we held the birds by the feet as we scalded and the skin of the feet was never in the hot water so did not come off. Oh well! Now we know and next time I will have slickly skinned feet when they come into the kitchen!

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Cool, wash and bag

Ideally, you would have a large tub of ice water to cool the cleaned chickens nearby. Since we forgot to get bags of ice until we were going (another whoops!) we just transported them right into our kitchen in a large tote and cooled them in cold running water, cleaned them up (hand plucked the feathers that didn’t come out in our error) and bagged them right there.

We used large heavy plastic zipper bags we use for our farm pie business to store the birds in the freezer. I think for our turkeys we will purchase the large shrink bags that are made for this purpose because we don’t have any other bags large enough.

The shrink bags keep air away from the poultry and extend the life in the freezer too. There is a link for them below.

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Refrigerate and Freeze

After bagging we put them right into an extra fridge we keep for extra produce and groceries for a couple of days. This helps to deep cool and tenderize them a bit before moving to the freezing.

Meat Chicken Processing Day Video

How we cook and use our chicken

I exclusively roast our chickens whole. That is just the way we like them best. Occasionally, when we can access good clean meat in quantities we have purchased boneless skinless thighs. But, generally speaking, I prefer to buy or raise whole chickens so we can have the carcass for bone broth.

Generally, I cook two chickens at a time. We eat one for the current meal and save the meat from the other for another meal later that week. Sometimes we freeze the extra meat for a later date. Then the carcasses are always put in a pot to make bone broth.

I’m afraid these large 6 1/2 pound chickens will only fit one at a time in my dutch oven so I will have to adjust my meal prep thinking a bit.

So, now that you’ve seen how novices process their chickens…

If you are still reading, I commend you! Hopefully, you learned from our mistakes. And, that you have seen that you don’t have to be experts at something to give it a go at providing all your own food.

Thanks so much for joining me here in the farmhouse this week. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please join my farm life community below. You will get access to My Best Chicken Prep Tips and all the other goodies in my subscriber’s only Resource Library you can access any time.

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Shopping links for items mentioned

Resources

This video from Josh at the Stoney Ridge Farmer and this video from Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms are very helpful if you want to learn more about how to butcher your own chickens.

Also, remember the Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery I mentioned. It has everything you could possibly want to know about anything to do with raising your own meat animals.

We get our meat chicks from Moyer’s Chicks. We ordered all males. These were hands down the healthiest and brightest chicks we have ever received in the mail.

We also got our Brown Egg Layers from them in spring 2018. They laid prolifically beginning late summer and continued all through the winter and this summer. It has been amazing! We eat a LOT of eggs and we’ve still sold over 30 dozen eggs this spring and summer. That is something we have never done with this amount of chickens in the past.

Thanks again for joining me today….have a blessed week! Julie

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