One More For The Freezer

Raising chickens has been an interesting learning experience.  When I got chickens I had intended on using them for eggs and meat.  Harvesting eggs is easy and fun.  Harvesting meat is my least favorite job in the world, but a necessary evil if I want to eat my chickens.  Taking a life is never an uplifting experience so I try to be as calm and respectful as I can.  My hands shake every time.

I have learned that I prefer to do my butchering at dusk, not long after the chickens have put themselves to bed for the night.  They are easier to catch and handle in the low light and seem much less stressed at this time of day.  On my planned butchering day I will start heating the water in the scalding pot about an hour before dusk.  While that is heating I set up my butchering station outside which consists of a killing cone with a bucket below it to catch the mess.  I also take the time to sharpen my knife (this makes a fast, clean kill more likely).  Once the water has reached 160 degrees it is time to harvest the chicken.

Once I get the gruesome part over with, I move on to the next step - scalding and plucking.  I usually keep a bag on hand to catch all the feathers and extraneous bits like the head and feet.  I just dunk the chicken into the scalding water for a few minutes and swish it around to make sure the hot water soaks through to the base of the feathers and loosens them.  Then a small mess ensues and I am left with a bald chicken that looks a lot like what you get from a grocery store.  The only difference that I have noticed is that my home grown chickens are much larger and have sturdier bone structure than the franken-chickens that come from the store.  The legs are much closer to the size of turkey legs in my opinion, but that is probably because they come from a dual purpose breed that has had time to grow to full size.

I generally part my chickens out before I freeze them and I save the carcass and some of the organ meats for making stock later.  From one chicken I can get eight to ten meals for myself if I include the stock and meat scraps that I glean from the cooked carcass.  These dual purpose chickens can weigh upwards of ten pounds when they are fully grown which is considerably larger than the chickens that can be bought at the local grocery store.  Most of the difference in weight would be due to the heavier bone structure in a dual purpose breed, but they still provide plenty of meat and are well worth the effort of growing them out slowly over a longer time period in my opinion.  Not to mention that the flavor of homegrown chicken is so much better than the store-bought variety.