We are friends with a really great Amish family and this year we paid them to raise forty broiler chickens for us. They also helped us butcher them which was really nice because I would have had no idea what to do. The pictures above show you the difference between Broiler chickens (on the left) and regular laying hens (on the right). Can you see how much fatter the broilers are?
WARNING: I tried not to post gross pictures, but ... we were butchering and cooking chickens ... so browse carefully if that sort of thing bothers you.
My brother's job was to catch the chickens and bring them to us. They often wriggled out of his arms and off they went all around the barn chasing them down. He's such a cutie!
This sure looks like I was really involved with the killing/skinning/gutting process, but that's really not how it was. I didn't get sick, like when I watched our neighbor's cow give birth, but I kept shivering and my hands were weak ... ya, so the chicken you see me skinning is actually the only one I skinned and I only skinned it halfway. After that I ran errands, made dinner, and carried buckets to and from the barn where we butchered the chickens and the house where we washed and gutted them.
I've butchered chickens before with other Amish friends, but that time we dunked the chickens in hot water, hung them upside down in the tree, plucked the feathers off, and burned the hairs off with a blowtorch. This time we skinned them and it was so much faster, but of course, if you lose the skin on your chicken ... so, we're seeing how we like this batch.
Up in the house we washed the chickens, gutted them, and packed them three-to-a-bucket in ice. I had to run to the store twice for ice. The cashier at the store remembered me and we had a good laugh. We packed the buckets in the back of our van and kept them on the front porch over night with cinder blocks on top so the dogs or wild animals couldn't get into them.
We brought the buckets in one by one and froze/canned it all over the next week.
Last year, we bought our chickens already butchered and some of them were even cut into peices for us ... talk about ease! This year we cut them all up ourselves. Because the breasts on these birds were so HUGE we cut a lot of them off and froze them in seal-a-meal bags.
Last year, we also saved the hearts and livers, but none of us could bare to cook them in anything so we ended up feeding them to the dogs in the end. This time we gave all of the hearts, livers, and gizzards to the family who helped us butcher.
Here, Mom is trimming up the chicken breasts as she reads to my little brother out of the picture edition of The Book Of Mormon. He has a list of things he has to get done in the morning before he can eat like get dressed, make his bed, brush his teeth, brush his hair, etc. and one of them is read his scriptures.
Trimmed-Up Chicken Breasts ...
I washed them before I froze them. I actually didn't get any pictures of how we vacuum sealed the bags of chicken and then froze them ... but there are a few more pictures of us doing that last year if you wanted to check out the process.
My sister washed the chickens-minus-the-breasts before they were boiled.
They sat and boiled for two hours or more. We know it's time because the meat just peels off the bones. We had meat boiling on our stove for two days ... try and imagine what our kitchen smelled like after that. It's infinitely better than boiling beef bones, but it still didn't smell pretty.
After the chicken has boiled enough we pull it out into one of our huge metal bowls and once it's cool enough we pick the meat off the bones. The dark meat and the white meat is put in separate jars because we like white meat for chicken salad and dark for soup and gravy.
JACKPOT! There were forty wishbones to find, but we didn't find all of them.
They're all in a jar on the pantry shelf for anyone who feels like having a friendly competition.
After the jar is filled with chicken it is completely filled with the water that the chickens boiled in, a sanitized canning lid is popped on the top and a ring screws it all together. We have the pressure caner in the green house now, which is nice because it keeps the counters free in the kitchen and the sputtering weight-gage-noise to a minimum.
And there we are ... that project is finished for another year. Next year, if we do butcher chickens again I want to force myself to be a little more involved (even though I'm totally comfortable with he whole killing/skinning/gutting thing). I think times are ahead when it will be important to know these types of things and I want to be prepared.
Happy Thanksgiving ... fifteen days in advance!
Happy Thanksgiving ... fifteen days in advance!
