Easy Chicken Harvesting

 As I have previously mentioned, my chickens (currently all  layers) sometimes transition to the dinner table, one way or another.  Sometimes I sell them.  Most people, when they process a chicken, pluck it, carefully evacuate the abdominal cavity, and refrigerate or freeze it whole.  There are innumerable videos online of how to do this, such as this one from Justin Rhodes.

Plucking is a barrier.  I have done it--by hand, as I do not have a plucker.  I did not scald (I have done only one to five birds at a time).  I gutted the rooster in the post linked above, and I kept the skin on for the leg and thigh quarters.  Boneless skinless was the most natural way to process the breasts.

After that first bird, the solution that works for me with chickens is skinning and parting them out, leaving the guts in the abdomen.  Two very helpful videos on this are provided by the Sage and Stone Homestead and the Sarah Lynn Homestead. In my experience, about 75% of the hassle and upwards of 50% of the time associated with chicken processing is linked to plucking.  I like crispy skin on drumsticks as much as anyone, but I can give that up to save the effort and time. This is even more true when the parts are canned. Yes, automated chicken pluckers are fast, but they require scalding and they're expensive.  For my scale, they aren't worth it.

I can go from a live chicken to parted-out breasts and thigh/leg quarters in 20-30 minutes when following the practices in the videos above.  Given the amount of meat I get from my layers, that's a decent ROI for the time.

Older chickens can (should) be canned bone-in, and they turn out tender (trying to eat a two-year-old rooster that has been oven-baked is masochistic; I tried it; the flavor was okay, but my teeth hurt the next day).

Younger birds can be oven-baked and they turn out fine.

 This was a five-month-old barred rock rooster. I basted it with a simple mix of:

4 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 teaspoon of thyme, sage, and salt

It was tender.  Coming out of the oven, it looked like this:

 

That's perfectly decent.  I didn't miss the skin at all. I don't know that I'll ever raise chickens primarily for meat, but going forward, any that I do process, I plan to skin them and part them out at the time of butchering.  It's vastly easier than the alternative.
 

 

The End of Psycho

 As I mentioned a few months ago, my Barred Rock rooster was not behaving well.  Things continued to deteriorate with him to the point that holding him down brought no improvement at all; he'd come at me in another day or two again.  Two things made me finally pull the plug:  The first was the realization that I didn't want to propagate his bloodline (Joel Salatin, in his new book, makes it clear that animals with behavioral problems have to be culled to get improvement in whatever you're breeding).  The second (and probably decisive) element was the attack at my face that left me bleeding in several places.  Yes, I should've been more wary around him, and yes, the injuries overall were relatively minor.  But still.  I was kneeling on the ground refilling their feeder, and he came around and hit me from above and the side.  So he truly had to go.

Ultimately, the destiny of all of them is the freezer.  He just got there a little sooner than he would have otherwise.

Shown below are the breast meat fillets:

The one on the bottom is from Tyson--it's a Cornish Cross breast, so is larger, but the color difference is striking. 

The rooster was about 18 months old, so the meat was a little firm, but not objectionably so.  The Tyson breast, coming from a chicken that was about eight weeks old.  It was definitely more tender.

I processed him on a Sunday, breaking the meat down right away.  It sat in the refrigerator for a couple of days before being frozen for another few days before baking.  That should have been enough time for any post-death rigor mortis to subside. So I'm assuming the not-entirely-tender quality of the breast meat was due to age alone. However, as I do more, I'll have to keep an eye on it.

Canning Chicken

I have a pressure canner--I actually have two; one bought last summer and one bought a few years ago.  The picture is of my largest, an All American 921 that can hold stacked pint jars.

I have always planned to take up pressure canning, but until now haven't.  I'm not concerned about the pressure canner blowing up.  The All American has six screw-down locks, additional lugs to prevent the lid from blowing off if the main locks somehow fail, and a overpressure plug that will blow out at some point if pressure increases.  And I'm now under 1000 feet in elevation, so am able to can at 10 psi instead of 15, thus reducing the potential problems with pressure, anyway.  My main concern has been food safety.

I've gotten very comfortable with canning acidic foods, but botulism poisoning would be a show-stopper.  But it is also very rare (only 17 cases of foodborne botulism reported in 2018).  So whatever people are doing to can low-acid foods seems to work reasonably well--and I assume that the directions at the NCHFP site are designed to be safe at the > 99% level. However, the site also has horror stories.

All this being said, procedurally, pressure canning of most things is pretty easy--much more so than peach preserves, for example, which require a number of steps to get to the point that something is ready to go into jars.

For chicken, it's very easy.  In this first attempt, I canned some boneless, skinless chicken breasts.  I just cut the raw breast meat up into small pieces and packed the pieces into the jars.  I got about 13 ounces in each jar, leaving about 1 1/4" headspace (to the 'freeze' line).  The processing time is 75 minutes for pints. I processed them for 80 minutes, just to be sure the jars got to 240 degrees throughout.

If you look around online, you'll find some sites that suggest adding liquid to raw-packed meat jars before processing.  In my case, that would not have worked.

As the picture below shows, the jars are pretty full of liquid.  This may be because of the chicken I used--Great Value from Walmart.  The package said something about how the chicken may contain brine, much like the turkeys for sale around Thanksgiving.  The NCHFP site notes that there usually isn't enough liquid in raw-packed meats to cover the contents of the jar, but it worked fine with my low-grade chicken. As a side note, I'd intended to add 1/2 teaspoon of salt to each jar, but forgot--nonetheless, when I opened a jar the next day to sample it, it seemed as though it was seasoned just fine--because of the brine, I assume.

Last summer I didn't do any canning, partly because the house was hot and the thought of running boiling pots on the stove for a long period of time wasn't attractive.  That will definitely be a factor this summer, as well, which is fast-approaching.  I do have an outdoor camp stove with two propane burners that I plan to try using (though the NCHFP discourages this; it seems that it should be doable without causing damage to the canner since the body is so thick--and burners can always be turned down).  All this being said, the big canner seems to absorb and internalize most of the heat, not radiating much out into the room.  Some steam escapes, but it's less than with a boiling water bath or atmospheric steam canner.

Going forward, I expect most of my canning to continue to be non-pressurized.  However, it's nice to have the option to can low-acid foods, as well.