Processing Poultry

Insights on 'Innards and the Cost of Seeing 'Em

There was a lot of excitement building up around the homestead prior to processing day. I had my brand new poultry plucker tucked away in the front closet, which I enjoyed shuffling to in an Igor-esque style and presenting with loving strokes to overly polite guests. The girls knew that chicken processing day meant friends coming over, but I don't think they ever expected the day-long affair of playing, unobserved snack consumption, and TV time. For them the truck bed of slowly diminishing chickens, along with the whole process, was mostly a thing of fleeting curiosity or a chance to try their hand at chicken wrangling.

Just to be clear, this wasn't our first year processing chickens, but it sure felt like our first year doing it right! Let's call last year "year zero," and I will just say that processing birds and plucking by hand, in the sun, with old tables and dull knives, is a mistake that we only made once. Sure, everything got processed, and we had a whole chicken every week for the rest of the year, but it's okay that I'm grateful that we invested just under $1000 this time around for an easier and better processing experience, and it was worth every penny.

Let me start with the most expensive item first, the Roots and Harvest 1.5hp Poultry Plucker at $500. This stamped stainless steel stud was a pleasure to work with on so many levels; I still open the closet just to see it sometimes. In year zero, myself and one other unfortunate soul were the plucking pair, and we were each averaging a bird every three minutes in terms of complete plucking. Whereas this year with the plucker, it was down to around 30-45 seconds for two birds, and that was only when the water had cooled a bit too much and the feathers were tougher to pull. The fact that I didn't have to smell wet feathers even a quarter of the time compared to year zero, and it reduced hands-on time by 2+ minutes per bird, made the poultry plucker my wisest investment.

The next most expensive purchase was the two fish filleting tables for roughly $120 each from Amazon. The tables allow two people ample working room while the cupped sides constrain slippery and nude poultry from sliding off. The ability to push liquid from the edges of the table into the center drain port was great in terms of how easy it made keeping things a little bit cleaner; it was like a miniature, gross wave pool. The two dads working this table did end up rigging the legs so it sat around 6" taller, and they weren't stooping quite as low, whereas the ladies ended up choosing to sit at theirs for a more comfortable innards extraction.

A quick note on having level ground when processing. We were working over a 3" thick layer of wood chips, which was great because the blood and liquid bits that flies like so much leached into the wood chips and were not a problem. What I noticed that could have been better would have been to rake the area and check for level. There are definitely dips and grooves in that area of wood chips, and I know about halfway through the day, I kept finding the same little ankle-breaking dip every time I went to one spot of the processing area.

The knives were a source of satisfaction for me this year because they were very fairly priced at around $14 for one 5" knife or $35 for a set of three 3.5" knives. The company I went with was Morakniv out of Sweden, and I was thoroughly happy with how well they performed all day long, how comfortable they were to hold, and really, we processed about fifty birds before they needed several minutes on the sharpening stone. In year zero, we used a hodgepodge of kitchen knives, many of them dulled from years of use and misuse, and constant sharpening during processing day slowed things down. This year, I ordered more knives than we needed, but people switching out knives as they needed meant that all the knives were used, and that was the best outcome really because no one was forced to work with dull cutlery. After the processing was complete, I sharpened, oiled, and hugged each of the blades before I set them in their sheaths until later this year for the turkeys.

We spent roughly $150 on medical gloves, shrinking bags for the poultry, ice, towels, bleach, and other necessities that didn't really show individually, but all together, it took a chunk out of the bank. Two pop-up canopies were kindly loaned by Kayla's sister for the day; the one with the sunshade protecting the slaughter cone area ended up looking like a painting, so we actually charged HER when we sent it back!

Not really, we ordered her a new sunscreen for that one; the original was beyond saving. I also found out that a chicken in its death throes can poop upwards of 8 feet, but it washes off the ceiling of the canopy easily. Every day is an opportunity to learn!

There were a couple of sticking points, like the scalder not heating up fast enough, and when we process the turkeys later this year, I will want to add a standing fan or two to help with fly control. I put up fly tape, which did wonders, but everyone agreed that more wind would have reduced the numbers even more. The scalder is homemade and utilizes a 2000w heating element on 2/3rds of a 55-gallon barrel steel drum. Adding insulation will help a lot in terms of reducing temperature fluctuation, along with a double-hinged lid to retain the heat between sauna dips.

It wasn't a perfect day; there were hiccups and frustrations throughout the whole process, but the day was fulfilling on so many levels that I can't help but be happy with how it went. Overall, it was a good day with friends for all the ages present, and it gets harder every day to ask for more than that.