Chicken Butchering Time

If you don't know where your food comes from, really, then you probably don't want to read this post. If you do, and you understand what a small family farm is about, then go ahead. This is for you!

I got baby chickens in May specifically for butchering. I keep seeing on the packages in the store that the chicken has been 'enhanced with a ___% solution' (fill in the blank). For what?  To fatten it up and make you think you're getting more than you are, because when you cook it, all that 'enhancement' cooks out and you have a much smaller piece than you started with. And, you don't know what is  in that 'solution' other than water (a lot of water) and a lot of salt. I don't mind raising my own meat. I have a cow in a pen right now just to get butchered and if I figure out where to put a pig, I'll get one of those too. Yes, it is expensive, but I know what went into it so I feel safe eating it and I'm not paying for any extra 'enhancements' (thinking of pink slime here).

Yesterday was time to butcher those chickens. I got out my turkey fryer (a gas burner on a stand with a tall aluminum pot) and a large tub with a lot of ice. I am the chicken wrangler, and my husband is the chicken slayer. I caught them and he tied them upside down and then beheaded them. If you don't tie them somewhere, they will fly, headless, all over the place and make an even bigger mess. It is very surreal. We had water boiling in the turkey fryer to scald the chickens. Holding them by the feet we dunked them in the boiling water a couple seconds and then the feathers came off pretty well. Rinse with the water hose and remove the guts, rinse again and remove the feet and toss them into the tub of ice water. We took them into our butchering room, a/k/a the old milk house, with the stainless table (all cleaned with bleach, I assure you) and then cut them up and put them into a fresh tub of icy bleach water. Rinse again to get rid of the bleach and then bag it up and freeze it. Why the bleach? To kill any salmonella. We're pretty particular about that. Aren't you? 

Sequence of the chickens' lives:

 

Baby chicks arrive very hungry. 

                                                          Yep, same chickens, all grown up.

                                                       Finished product, ready to freeze and eat.

Hey, at least I didn't take pictures of us killing, cleaning, and cutting them up!