Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens (99 page)
Read Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens Online
Authors: Gail Damerow
An easy way to kill a chicken is to place a broom handle across the neck, stand on the handle, and firmly pull the bird upward until the neck snaps.
Using a knife.
If you have a lot of chickens to kill at one time, using a sharp knife lets you work fast. Suspend each bird from twine tied around its legs. With one hand, grasp the beak in front of the eyes and pull down hard to hold the bird steady. With a sharp knife in the other hand, make a 2-inch (5 cm) cut just behind the jaw and into the base of the skull on both sides of the neck, severing the jugular vein.
BLEEDING |
Bleeding is an important part of the killing process to ensure no trace of blood remains in the meat for the best flavor, appearance, and keeping quality. It must be done while blood still flows freely. Be ready to deal with the several tablespoons of blood that will flow from each chicken, either by working where it may be easily flushed away or by having a bucket or other collection container on hand. If you plan to compost the blood, a little water in the container will keep it from coagulating. Have additional water handy to rinse away any spills. |
Use a knife to slit the jugular vein. To keep blood from spattering, you have at least three choices: |
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Keep a tight hold on the bird until flapping and bleeding stop.Debraining helps loosen feathers for hand picking. Debraining is done with a sticking knife, which has a dagger-type blade that’s usually sharp on both sides; any knife with a sharp, narrow blade will do. After cutting the vein for bleeding, insert the knife into the mouth, its sharp edge toward the groove at the roof. Push the knife toward the back of the skull and give it a one-quarter twist. The trick is to avoid sticking the front of the brain, which causes feathers to tighten instead of loosen. You can tell your knife has hit home when reflex causes the dead bird to shudder and utter a characteristic squawk.
Stainless-steel killing cones come in various sizes to snugly fit the size of the chicken; a traffic cone, or an empty bleach or laundry detergent jug with the top and bottom cut off, makes a workable substitute.
Using a gun.
A .22 handgun makes a fast, clean job of it but is a suitable option only if you are familiar with guns and live in a rural area where shooting is legal and may be done safely. Hang the bird by its legs and shoot a round into the back of the head just above the eyes. This method kills quickly, causes nerves to relax, and loosens feathers for easy removal. Immediately after shooting, bleed by cutting the jugular vein.
Once the bird is dead, you have to decide whether to remove the head before or after picking. The correct thing to do is leave the head on until the feathers are removed, which keeps the neck clean for making soup, broth, or gravy. Because I don’t like having a chicken stare accusingly at me while I relieve it of its feathers, I behead first.
The process of removing feathers is called
picking
in the industry and
plucking
in other circles. For sanitary reasons, it makes good sense to kill and pluck in one area, then rinse and pack in another. If you have a helper, the operation goes quickly if one does the picking and the other does the packing.
Not being one to follow the conventional wisdom that picking is less messy if you do it outdoors, I prefer to work indoors, where it’s cool and I don’t have to fight off flies and yellow jackets. I kill four birds at once and bring them inside for picking. Four is as many as I can do before the last one starts getting stiff and difficult to manage. When I’m done, I go back and get four more.
How you pick will depend on how often you butcher and how many birds you have. Picking may be done in four ways:
Hand picking
involves pulling feathers out by hand. It may be done by either the dry-pick method or the scald-and-pick method discussed further on. With either method, using rubber finger tips from an office supply, or rubberized knit gloves from a hardware store, would help improve your grip to make the job go more swiftly.
Dry picking is suitable when you have only a few birds. It’s easy when chickens are freshly killed and still warm, especially if they’ve been debrained. But it’s not so easy after they start to cool. The best plan is to strip away the feathers quickly while the birds are hung for bleeding. If you’re allergic to feathers or dander, wear a dust mask during dry picking.
After the main feathers have been removed, some immature feathers will remain. These pinfeathers are less numerous in a commercial-broiler strain than
in other breeds. They may be removed using your fingers, with the occasional stubborn one pulled out with tweezers. A pinfeather scraper, or pinning knife, with a rounded 3- to 4-inch (7.5 to 10 cm) blade is easier on the fingers; a suitable substitute is a paring knife with a dull blade. If you regularly pluck chickens of a breed with lots of pinfeathers, you might consider using hot wax.
Wax picking
follows rough hand picking as a fast way to get birds clean. It involves dunking the whole bird in heated picking wax paraffin, then dunking it in cold water to harden the wax. Peel away the wax, and the feathers and pin-feathers alike come right off. When you’re all done, let the remaining wax cool in the pot. Feather debris will settle to the bottom, and you can save the clean wax on top for reuse. If you melt the wax in a kettle of steaming hot water, the paraffin will float at the top and you will need less of it; allow one pound per four birds. Wax picking is used less often for chickens than for ducks and geese, which are more difficult to pick clean.
NO MORE PLUCKING |
Poultry is the only meat harvested with the skin intact, and with today’s concern about fat and cholesterol, few people eat the skin anyway. So why go through all the mess and bother of plucking chickens? For one thing, the meat may be more moist and tender cooked with the skin on and then skinned before eating. But lots of recipes produce chicken that’s moist and tender without the skin. You can skin a young bird in about half the time needed for hand plucking, and you won’t have to delay butchering day until your broilers pass the pinfeather stage. |
Another option is to wait until featherless chickens come to the United States. Developed in Israel from a Naked Neck (Turken) crossed with a normal broiler, these chickens have only a few tufts of feathers on their pink skin. They don’t waste a lot of energy making feathers that get thrown out anyway, and compared to regular broilers they grow faster in hot climates, where the growth rate is normally limited because nutritional energy must be restricted to keep broilers from overheating under all that plumage. But don’t think about raising these chickens in a cold climate, where they require the expense of a heated facility, or in an unshaded pasture, as they have no protection from sunburn. |
Machine picking
saves time if you’re butchering a lot of chickens. Picking machines come in two styles, both of which require chickens to be scalded first. A
tabletop picker
has a rotating drum with rubber fingers against which you hold one bird at a time while the feathers are flailed off. A
tub picker
has rubber fingers lining a rotating drum into which you drop one chicken or more; the feathers are flailed off as the drum spins.
Picking machines don’t come cheap. You can reduce the cost by making your own, using plans included in the book
Anyone Can Build a Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker
by Herrick Kimball. If local laws allow, you might defray the cost of buying or building a mechanical picker by doing custom plucking on the side or by letting others use your machine on a rental basis.
A mechanical picker can cut down plucking time to as little as half a minute, which sounds nifty until you learn that a University of Arkansas study found mechanically picked chickens are 2½ times tougher than hand-plucked birds. If you butcher older chickens, which tend to be tough anyway, hand picking is the way to go.
Custom picking
is no longer common in many areas, but if the idea of killing your own chickens seems too messy or distasteful, you might look for a local custom butcher or picker. You may even find someone with a licensed mobile unit. Otherwise, you’ll have to transport your live chickens to the facility.
As an alternative, seek out someone who cleans game birds for hunters. Make sure the person knows how to deal with live birds, though: one fellow I know who regularly picked dead birds for hunters happily killed a bunch of chickens for a friend but didn’t know he was supposed to bleed them.
Chickens are easier to pick if you first loosen the feathers by dipping each bird in scalding water. The dunking kettle must be large enough so when you dip and slosh, the rising water won’t overflow. A standard-size enamel canning pot two-thirds full is just right for most chickens. A large stockpot is also a good size for all but the biggest breeds.
You might heat the kettle on a gas stove, over a propane burner designed for camping, or on a grill over a wood fire. Some folks heat the water in a turkey fryer. If you plan to pick a lot of birds, you might invest in a thermostatically controlled dipping vat, or make your own from plans in the book
Anyone Can Build a Whizbang Chicken Scalder,
also by Kimball.
Scalding a chicken without tearing the skin or cooking the meat requires a combination of proper water temperature and appropriate scalding time. Young
birds with tender skin need a lower temperature and shorter scalding time than older birds with tough skin. Unfortunately, scalding at a high temperature stiffens muscle tissue, making tough meat even tougher. A high temperature also causes the outer layer of skin to come loose. When you’re butchering for your own use, appearance may not be a problem, but it becomes an issue when chickens are butchered for sale.