Tag: Chickens

From henhouse to freezer: the process of processing

So here is the chicken situation: we got 40 chicks, raised them, kept the hens for egg laying and processed and froze the roosters.  Well, almost all the roosters: we kept one for breeding.  His name is Lucky.  Believe it or not, all of this went exactly according to plan.  Well, almost exactly.

We figured a “straight run” of chicks – a chance mixture of both sexes – would come out close to a 50/50 mix.  But no.  Once they started to grow out of fuzzball stage, we started sorting them out and we found we had 12 females and 28 males!  Yikes!

That was a little more processing than we had counted on.  And fewer egg layers than we’d hoped for.  The other monkey wrench was our trip to Hawaii: we had it scheduled the day after the chickens turned 15 weeks old.  I read that our type of chickens, Barred Plymouth Rocks, should be processed between 15 and 20 weeks old.  But I didn’t want the pet-sitter to have to deal with an unruly gang of fighting, crowing roosters.  So, they all had to go – way ahead of schedule.

We learned how to process from very nice strangers who responded to my request on an online chicken forum I belong to.  I asked anyone in the greater Bay Area if they wouldn’t mind teaching us how to process, and, by gum, someone offered!  So, in November, we drove two hours to help people kill, pluck and eviscerate their chickens.  We actually had a great time and even Sarah helped pluck!

So, when it was time to do our own, we had some idea what to do.  Turns out processing chickens is slow work, so we took them in batches.  One day we did three, the next time we did six, after that we did eight, then just two (taught someone else how!), and finally finished with another batch of eight.

killing cone
dunking

Here’s the rough idea: catch a roo, hold him by the feet so he is upside down (it calms them), put him in the “killing cone”, slit his throat and let him bleed out, wait for the shaking to stop, cut off the head (he is already dead), dunk in 145 to 150 degree water a few times, hang by the feet and pluck.  Then remove feet and neck and eviscerate CAREFULLY.  This takes some time.  Plucking takes some time too.

plucking

Equipment we used: a metal cone for killing, a wheelbarrow of straw to catch the blood, a propane burner and lobster pot for dunking (and a thermometer), a rope with slipknot for the plucking area, an outdoor sink for our evisceration station, a cooler with ice for finished chickens, and VERY SHARP KNIVES.  We also bought a good vacuum sealer for sealing up the chickens before freezing them.

One thing we learned about freezing the chickens is that they need to rest in the refrigerator for three days before freezing, to go through rigor mortis.  So, you can either process a chicken and then immediately cook it (before rigor sets in) or wait the three days and freeze it.  So far we ate five fresh, gave one away, and froze 21.  That might sound like a lot of chickens in the freezer, but keep in mind these were processed quite early, so they’re little.  But they’re still yummy!

– Lizzy

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First day of Spring!

What a great day we had today!  It was sunny and warm, and we got a lot done on the land – but I also totally scored at Goodwill.  Sometimes, the Goodwill gods shine down upon me, and today was one of those days.  I got: practically new snow pants for Sarah, snow boots for Sarah, foul weather boots for me, lots of shirts for me and for Sarah, sweaters for me and even a parka!  This is all in preparation for our trip to Yosemite next month, during Spring break.  But the best deal of all was a pair of Dansko clogs – the only shoes I will wear – which retail for $125 new.  Guess how much they were?  Five dollars and twenty-five cents.

After the shopping spree, we got to work.  First on the agenda: finally finish moving all the branches that were pruned from the 45 apple trees in January.  We loaded them into the truck and put them in the burn pile.  Here’s truck load number twelve or something (we lost count):

And here is the burn pile, currently.  Actually, it’s the burn staging area since that would be too much to burn at once.  Keep in mind there is also a giant oak tree we took down (not in photo) that is partially chainsawed apart and also needs to be burned.

That done, we worked some more on putting up our garden fence.  We have already put up the 58 ten-foot-tall posts and now it’s time to wrap them with fencing material.  We got maybe 1/4 of the way done today. The brown house on the right is our neighbor’s house.  Ours is the white one barely visible in the upper left.

Anyway, Jason stapled while we both pulled on the fencing, and then I hammered the staples in more tightly.  We had to watch out that we didn’t pull the fencing too taut, because it was bending the posts!

When we’d had enough of that, we took a break and let our almost-three-week-old chicks outside for the first time!  They were hesitant at first, but then came out and had a wonderful time.  And we had a great time watching them!  I did some research on how our breed of chicken -Barred Rock- “feathers out” and then looked at our chicks closely.  Looks like we’ve got exactly 20 females and 20 males!  Here’s a video Jason took of our cuties:

Well, that’s it for today.  Happy Spring, everyone!

– Lizzy