Re: Butchering Chickens

Posted by JD Farmer on June 29, 2014 at 19:14:32 from (50.41.62.145):

In Reply to: Butchering Chickens posted by John in La on June 29, 2014 at 09:44:34:

We butchered about 90 meat chickens this spring. So here are some pics of the process.



We use the old butchering kettle to heat the hot water. It will hold around 15 gallons. Bring the water to a rolling boil and you are then ready to kill the first 5 or 6 chickens.



Once the chickens are bled out, take a 5 gallon bucket and put 2" of COLD water in it then top it off with the boiling water. We use a "dipper" I made to get the boiling water out of the kettle into the bucket for scalding. This will allow scalding for 5 or 6 chickens from the same water, that way the water stays clean in the kettle....which allows us to process 15 chickens on one kettle of water.

We dump the bucket every 5 chickens to keep the water clean for scalding. All depends on how dirty the chickens are and how much help you have around.



Here you see the killing cones I made up. These work pretty well, but for next year I will lower them some to make it easier to get the chickens into them. That's my wife and daughter, one helped me do the killing and the other helps my son do the butchering.



Here is where we do the plucking, feathers go in the blue tubs, one bucket of cold water for rinsing, once nearly all of the feathers are plucked the bird goes in a tub of bleach water before gutting.





Final cleaning of the feathers before gutting them, once they are cleaned and rinsed with a garden hose they go into a cooler with ice and water. We like to let them set until the next day on ice water, seems to tenderize the meat a little and gives the wife a break before processing them for the freezer.



We'll bring a trailer load of 15 or more at a time, this way we don't have to run back and forth to the chicken house each time we kill a few. Also working in the shade makes it a lot easier too. This was the first year we done everything outside...makes cleanup a bunch easier, and we don't have to worry about a mess in the garage to hose out at the end of the day.

So with our little operation we can do around 25 or 30 in a weekend morning, and spread the work out over 2-3 weeks starting when they weigh around 5 pounds and ending when they weigh around 8 pounds. We also select the larger ones each time we go for a group.

Replies:

• Re: Butchering Chickens supergrumpy 05:17:24 06/30/14 (0)
• Re: Butchering Chickens Greg1959 19:32:19 06/29/14 (0)

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