If you don’t want to be a sheep, you may have to learn to kill a chicken.
March 8th, 2009 at 2:52 pm by Michele
I have a keen interest in being self sufficient, especially now with America as we know it hanging by such as tenuous string. I’m ashamed that due to the fact that I grew up in suburbia, just about as far from the Oklahoma dirt farm as one could possibly get, I never learned to do all of the everyday things my grandmother could do by the age of 7. I have learned to grow things, to store things, and to shoot things (well, targets). But I’ve never killed a thing, and had never learned to properly prepare a chicken from scratch. When I say “from scratch”, I mean the chicken starts out scratchin’ in the dirt and ends up sizzlin’ over the coals. Yesterday my family was invited to a friend’s house to learn this valuable lesson. I decided to document it for all of you suburbanites out there.
Be forewarned. Click on the following links at your own discretion. The images are huge and colorful. Personal responsibility, folks.
Here’s is a detailed lesson on one of the six meats. Actually, six roosters:
First select and catch your bird.
Second decide on how to properly dispatch him to chicken heaven.
Here are four methods:
You can 1) place his neck on a block and chop. Which is messy and more difficult than it sounds. 2) Grab him by the neck with one hand, and by the back legs with another, as if you were holding a very strange guitar, then quickly pull your hands in opposite directions. One of us tried this. It hurt the chicken unnecessarily without bringing about the intended outcome. 3) You can grab the rooster by the neck and with a whipping and twisting motion, snap it. If you can do this on the first try, you should by given a prestigious Expert Chicken Whacker award. This takes more practice than most men think they need. 4)The broomstick approach: Lay the rooster on the ground with a broomstick across his neck. Grab his back legs and pull. This is the method we used. Just don’t pull too hard.
This is the point where he becomes a Democrat. I know this because every one of them called out to “BARRRAAACCK” before he expired.
You know the deed is officially done when the chicken starts flapping uncontrollably. I know that sounds strange. My son commented “Seems you’ve interrupted his nervous system.” That’s one way to put it.
Once he’s done flapping, scald the bird in some not-yet-boiling water for 30 seconds to loosen his feathers, after which you hang him up and pluck away. Once the bird cools the feathers are hard to pluck, so begin with the wingtips because those are the most difficult. After this step he should look like the beautiful specimen above.
After he’s is plucked, he needs to be bled. Cut a slit from his neck to his breastbone, being careful to avoid the crop, and the dripping will begin. If you broke his neck to kill him then most of his blood is in his head, so there really isn’t a lot of it dripping. If you used the chopping method, then you probably look like a character in a horror movie, and you can skip the bleeding step.
After you have taken it down and laid it on flat surface (we used Death’s Door), you can begin to separate the crop from the surrounding tissues. This requires you to use your fingers. When it looks like this, you can just snip it off.
At some point you will want to break the legs and remove them.
Yes, you have to remove the bung hole and all that is attached to it without puncturing the intestines. Imagine that the anus is the nozzle of a ghastly garden hose. Cut all around the nozzle, put your hand in, break up all of the connections, and pull. Then keep digging like you’re cleaning out a pumpkin.
Now you’re all done with the difficult stuff! From this point on, the chicken is much like the kind you find in the grocery store. Just rinse it really good and cut it up.
It is recommended that you freeze the bird for 48 hours before you cook it. Due to rigor mortis, the meat is very tough if you cook it right away. We wanted to try it though, so we marinated 4 roosters for an hour in some Worcestershire, soy sauce, garlic, oregano, thyme, and apple cider vinegar, then threw them on the coals.
Here’s the aftermath.
I can’t even warn you enough about the other aftermath. Think carnage in technicolor and then decide if you have the fortitude to withstand viewing it. What I mean is that you really really really shouldn’t look at this. Okay, ready? Here’s the other aftermath.
That’s the part I forgot to ask about. So if anybody has any good ideas about what to do with the offal (that doesn’t involve a visit by the secret service) please let me know.
Now that you’re a vegetarian, you probably don’t care whether you know how to prepare a chicken anymore. But let me tell you, when all the money in your mattress is spent, and the food you have stored up is gone, and you’re placing those little chef’s hats on your housecat’s feet and trying to cram an apple in his mouth, you will wish you had a coop and some chickens.
Update: Thinking about having a pen in my backyard, and it looks like I’m not alone.
“The rising popularity of the feathered creature is due to the chicken’s ability to provide eggs, pest control, fertilizer and eventually meat.”
I’m not sure you can call them pets if you’re raising them for meat though.
Also I really want to thank the kind folks who put up with my family this Saturday, and taught us this valuable information. We had a great time. And my daughter is handling her post traumatic stress disorder just fine. I think some chicks would cure her entirely.
March 8th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Don’t be fooled. If the roles were reversed that chicken would eat you with a smile on his beak and without the slightest bit of remorse.
March 8th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
This is by far the most valuable and instructive post ever posted here. And it takes meat to a whole new level.
P.S. Was the high resolution really necessary? Rrrraaauuuulllppph.
March 8th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
“…prestigious Expert Chicken Whacker award.”
We gave this award to weird Steve Geiger in the seventh grade after we caught him all alone “occupying” himself in the gym shower. I never took another shower in junior high after that. I was thirty before I would even get naked again.
March 8th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Um, yeah, I’m going now to double my stockpile of beans. They’re a fine source of protein. We’ll have to survive the hunkerdown without the 6th meat here in the Holmes household, thank you very much.
March 8th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
I told you not to look.
March 8th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Good work. There’s an easier way to dispatch the little guys. Take 2 feet of baling twine (orange or yellow plastic twine used to tie bales of hay/straw) and tie a slip knot noose in each end. Loop the twine through a bit of wire fence at chest height. If you have a decent bit of fence you can set up a few of these, a wingspan apart. Stick a pair of Felco shears in your back pocket. Get the water boiling in a big pot (use the size larger than the one your friends had) at least 12 feet away from the slaughtering area (blood sprays). I used an old black enamel pot on a grate over a wood fire. You might cover Death’s Door with newspapers — makes it easier to clean up, especially if the birds have lice (ick, I know, but it happens). Put it up on some blocks and get a bench to sit on. Might as well be comfortable. If you do 100 birds in an afternoon, you’ll be glad to have somewhere to sit.
Walk down to the henhouse, catch the blighter, and carry him UPSIDE DOWN back to the fence. Makes him pass out or at least groggy. With his belly towards you, slip one chicken foot into each noose and tighten. Grab those shears, grab his head with the other hand, pull downward until taught, and cut through the neck close to his head. If you wiggle the head a bit the shears will usually find a slot between verts. Toss the head in a bucket and stand back QUICKLY. Bird will flap and bleed out really well. If it’s good woven wire fence, he won’t even get bruised much (you can get a lot of bruising if the bird dies on the ground). Keeps him clean, too.
Slip the feet from the twine and dip the bird in the water (not usually a full 30 seconds — you don’t want to cook the skin). Rubber gloves make it much easier to pluck large expanses of feathers quickly. Proceed with cutting, gutting, cleaning, etc.
I used to do a bird from capture to cut and wrapped in freezer paper in twenty minutes, on my own, with only the creek for plumbing (we were poor), and it was a bit of a walk to and from the henhouse. After each dozen birds, I eat a pack of peppermints and take a breather, change the water in the pot, and roll up the muss in the newspapers and lay down new ones.
If the economy continues to tank and you do set up a coop, the barred rocks that you butchered the other day make good steady layers. They’re pleasant compared to the reds, and that matters when you’re living with the things. If you do keep one of the roosters to ride herd on his girls (highly recommended), choose the one with the deepest chest and eat the taller cockerels. Plan to grow at least some of their feed, too.
Don’t let anyone talk you into butchering your own pigs. It’s unpleasant. Rabbits are easy, though, similar method to chickens (fence and twine and Felcos), but you trim the skin at the knees and neck and a few other spots and peel the pelt off like removing a swimsuit.
As for the offal, it’s a bit gross, but remove the gall bladder (bad stuff) and anything touched by bile and toss it in the trash. You can cook and eat the livers and hearts or do a giblets and gravy. The neck feathers of a rooster can be saved for tying flies — salt the skin and stretch it on a board. The rest of the feathers and skin go in the trash. The innerds and feet and all can go in that big enamel pot over the fire with some water and whole wheat (and cayenne in cold weather) and it’s mash for the hens to eat the next day. Let it cool so they don’t cook their little beaks.
March 8th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Wow! Thanks Sylvia. I’ll send that information along to the people who have the chickens and save it for myself too.
I did not know that the hens would eat that. As Preston so aptly put it: Rrrraaauuuulllppph.
March 8th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Michelle,
A resounding Brava. After I finished reading this and then once I was able to convince the neausea fueled sputum to go back from whence it came, I went to the closet equivalent of farmland I have near me here in Houston—I walked across the street and through a flower bed to get to the Kroger and bought canned vegetables.
And a chicken.
Already baked.
LK
March 8th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
You’re welcome, Michele. Your friends can write me if they have any questions. I had some interesting years on the farm in Montana. Most of what I know isn’t relevant in my daily life in Silicon Valley, but I still own the farm (no mortgage!), and if the next four years follow the path of the last forty days, we’ll be homeschooling and living off the land in the mountains again.
Gene Logsdon’s Practical Skills is an excellent handbook. You can find it used on abebooks.com.
And hens will eat anything. They’d prefer that stuff raw, but it’s a standard farm rule not to feed raw meat to any of the animals, especially dogs. You don’t want them to get a taste for it. Well, garden worms are okay.
March 8th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
No mortgage! Sounds like Heaven on Earth!
If you need any homeschooling tips, I’ve got those. Been doing that for four years now.
March 8th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Unfortunately, the current domicile has a California mortgage, but we’re close to family (Grandmother just turned 99). The farm is the bolt hole.
Thanks for the offer of homeschooling advice. We’d been doing “supplemental” school until this most recent high school, adding homeschool classes to what passed for an education in the California public system. DD’s 16 now and our goal is to survive in civilization long enough for her to finish at the surprisingly excellent local public high school. As I think about it, if we do have to leave before she finishes high school my guess is she’ll cram and take the GED and start college early. Fingers crossed…
March 8th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Did you cut out the little oil sac that is on the back just in front of the tail? My dad, who had a farming background, said you don’t want to cook the bird with that still in it.
Any chicken innards that come with supermarket chickens and that I don’t want to use go into a plastic bag in the freezer and then out with the trash on trash pickup day. That’s a whole big wad of feathers you had to deal with, though. Too much for the freezer.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Preston, this is NOT the “feminine touch” I expected Michele to bring to the site.
My inner-liberal is weeping for the chickens.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
If you don’t quit yer whining, I’m going to have her whack your inner chicken as well.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Nancy, your dad is 100% correct. I usually just whack the whole pope’s nose off — it’s been placed I’d rather not think about. The gland there is the oil the birds use to groom their feathers.
Once you’ve raised your own chickens, it’s awfully hard to eat commercial birds. There is one relatively local brand I can get that does a decent job of cleaning out the innerds, but even then I’ll find a bit of lung or windpipe in there. Yuck. Birds get washed thoroughly here, pope’s nose removed, unmentionables removed (if it’s a boy), all squishy red bits scraped out, and I pull out any remaining craw, too, as there is often a bit of the pink skin that goes around the sac still on the right breast. The meat itself can survive transportation and storage, but the innerds are more fragile and biologically, um, active so they don’t keep all that well. Just because it’s sealed in plastic doesn’t mean it’s smart to eat it…
Michele, how are your knife-sharpening skills? Good thing to know. And you might want to put in some target practice with a slingshot, and a crossbow while you’re at it. The Feds might regulate ammo but I doubt they’ll get around to slingshots and my dad (a Marine) has a big steel and rubber slingshot that has a really high degree of accuracy. Nifty thing. If you keep chickens, you’ll have predators, some of which taste good.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Judging by your picture of the offal, I’d say you have most of the makings of about five pounds of Jimmy Dean sausages there. Don’t let nobody fool ya, them’s good eatin’.
March 9th, 2009 at 7:49 am
I have long contended that the decline of our civilization is attributable in part to the fact that we no longer kill our own chickens.
That is why the population, as a whole, has not the stomach to end a war by winning it.
Try talking a chicken onto the plate.
The Taliban may not seem to have more brains than a chicken – but…..
March 9th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Easter time is when all the feed stores have chicks available for sale. You don’t have to order them, they’re in stock now!
March 15th, 2009 at 3:33 am
Wow! Some actual useful information for the first time on 6MB!
April 10th, 2009 at 7:50 am
Cool!
June 17th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Thank you so much for posting this! I have been looking all over for this method as we just had our first litter of rabbits to cull. We’ve dispatched 4 so far, and it has not been pleasant; on the contrary, quite unnerving. Hopefully this will prove to be a far less stressful technique on both my husband and I, and the cute, fluffy, white bunnies that need to go into our freezer.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Kathleen, if you need any other pointers, feel free to pop over to my blog and post your question in the comments for the latest post. Butchering rabbits *is* tough at first. It gets easier quickly, really.