Please note this post is about food preparation from the beginning.
In response to a comment and a couple of emails I have decided to tell how we prepare our chickens. The evening before D day we put the chickens in the coop and remove their food. This way they won’t have a full crop when we a re dressing them. They still have access to water but as it is at night they are sleeping and not eating anyway. We start nice and early in the day.
Before we do anything we heat water. We managed to get our hands on a metal keg barrel and over the years it has been used for many things. At present it is used for chicken plucking. We fill it half full with water and pop it on an old barbeque that we sit directly on cement up the back. We then wait till the water hits about 75 degrees celcius.
We then kill the chickens by breaking their necks and let it hang for a few minutes we do them in batches of 3 or 4. Hanging the chickens allows the blood to pool in their heads. There is no point in chopping their heads off to kill them. It is messy and stressful for all involved and “necking” them is easier to handle. If you hang them after necking them they won’t be able to bruise themselves. Generally the first bird killed is the first one in the hot water. We dunk the bird for thirty seconds moving it gently to try and get the heat to the skin.
The bird comes out and the two of pull the wing feathers and tail feathers out first. To be honest if these don’t come out fairly easily the bird needs to go back in the water or the water isn’t hot enough. K has large hands and basically he starts at the bottom of the bird and sweeps his hand up grabbing the feathers as he goes. He is very good at it this movement and takes most of the feathers in 2 movements one for the front one for the back.
We work together. We have a bucket of cold water beside us so we can rinse our hands off. feathers stick and so it is good to be able rinse them off to allow you to keep working. Once we think we have the majority of the feathers the bird is dunked again and the other person quickly wipes down the bench to keep the feathers to a minimum. The rest of the feathers are removed. K does this next part as he is quicker. He takes the head off. Then the feet, he slits the chicken from breast bone to anus and slips his hand in scooping out the insides so as not to break them and make a mess in the chook. Offal and feet are set aside for the dogs, the intestines are thrown out with the head. He is very good at it and is able to take the crop out as well all with minimum mess. The birds are then stacked out of reach until we finish the rest.
Inside we wash the chicken down throughly inside and out making sure everything is clean. At this point we often just freeze the biggest chickens whole but you could also take the chance to stuff the bird and season them before freezing.
As discussed in an earlier post I divide the rest of the chickens into various meals. I keep a couple of carcasses for soup and stock and the rest are used for the dogs or cats.
So that is how we deal with our chickens. And they taste really nice.
