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.
 

 

Sloppy Hoppy

 As I have mentioned before, I have canned a lot of rabbit. With the bones, quart jars are more or less needed, and the odd-shaped pieces of meat mean the quart jars won't have as much meat in them as they would if they were packed with boneless chicken breast chunks, but the process overall works well.

Then one has to figure out what to do with the canned rabbit.  It can be used any way you would use canned chicken, and another option is to use it in place of ground beef--they obviously are not the same, but one idea I got from a few podcasts was to make sloppy hoppy--i.e., sloppy Joes using rabbit meat instead of ground beef.  I looked and found some Crock Pot recipes, which I then adapted.

 

1 quart canned rabbit (usually about 1-1.5 lb of meat)

1 can tomato sauce (or tomato paste; see below)

2 Tb dried chopped onion, rehydrated

1 tsp. powdered garlic

2 Tb mustard

1/4 c brown sugar (or Whey Low for low-carb)

2 Tb white vinegar

2 Tb water (if tomato paste used; omit if using tomato sauce)

1 tsp Worchestershire sauce

1/2 tsp salt

My first attempt used tomato paste, because I thought the sauce would be too watery.  I would judge that to be a swing and a miss.  It ended up being edible, but it was obviously dry and it over-cooked and burned a little at the top edge in the Crock Pot (cooking time is about 4 hours on medium, which I have done, or 2-3 on high, which I have not tried).  The second effort with tomato sauce turned out well.

It's worth keeping in mind going forward.

 

 

 

Sun Tea

 This is one of those things I grew up with and have assumed everyone knows about, but the knowledge doesn't appear to be universal. It is how we pretty much always made tea for iced tea in the desert Southwest.

The process is pretty simple: put some tea bags in a clear jar of water, set out in the sun for a while, and then you have tea.  It's sun- and temperature-dependent, but either working separately, or both together, will lead to some degree of success.  In other words, a cold sunny day or a warm cloudy day will work, but a cold cloudy one won't be so good.  Sun seems to matter.  Regardless of temperature, tea seems to turn out better when it's in the sun.

I was surprised to read that some feel sun tea is potentially unsafe. If the bags are contaminated, they could be correct, but that's probably very unlikely (see also below).  If the water is contaminated when it goes out into the sun, then having it sit out there warming up for a few hours certainly won't help, but if the water is okay at the outset, the tea bags would be the only thing that could cause problems.  In my new house, I was originally on a bored well that had some contamination issues.  I didn't make sun tea much back then because of my work schedule.  The water I was drinking out of the bored well was a mess generally, with or without making it into tea.

Although I've been doing it for decades, the process I follow is still ad hoc and it's widely tolerant of divergence to the upside: leaving it out for too long does not ruin it.  I have a jug that's about 1.5 gallons, and I put three Luzianne family-sized tea bags into it.  Four can be used and will make satisfactory tea faster. Lipton or any other kind also work.

 

Then I just go by sight. On a sunny day in the summer, it can be ready in as soon as a couple of hours.  If it's spring or fall and cooler, it might take four.  If it is cloudy, it takes longer. As noted above, cloudy days often lead to cloudy tea, but I haven't studied it systematically.

 

Lipton, Luzianne, and possibly others also have cold brew varieties.  I have only seen Luzianne on the shelf.  It does work okay, though I let it go for longer than five minutes.  It can be put out in the sun and works fine that way, though I haven't tried it when it was warm out, just when it has been below about 50 degrees.  It doesn't have to go outside: it can also be made on the counter indoors.  The taste is different, but it'll work if nothing else does. And obviously, if sun tea poses a risk, cold-counter tea does, too.

 

Once tea is made, it lasts through the day and usually is good into the next day--but beyond that is very iffy.  Sometimes it's cloudy and getting off flavors the next day, too.  Various sites suggest letting it cool at room temperature before refrigerating it to ward off cloudiness. When the weather is cool outside, this won't be as much of an issue, but when it's warm, the water will obviously heat up even if there's cloud cover.

One of the better aspects of tea made this way is that it is cheap: If  $3.48 (as of May, 2022) buys 48 family-sized tea bags, and each batch yields 10 glasses, that's only about $0.02 per glass for the tea cost, plus any sweeteners or other flavorings added at the time of drinking.  That compares very favorably with any pre- made or mixed tea product.  So drink up!

Another Bread Fail?

 ...Or at least call it a less-than-optimal rise.  I baked another 100% whole wheat loaf, this time with Red Fife wheat, which is (so far) my favorite.  Here's the result:

It's not exactly a failed loaf; it's just more dense than normal. The comparison loaf is 100% white flour, which is always very fluffy. The rare 100% whole wheat splitting top crust was nowhere to be seen.  Still, I have had worse experiences.

 I think in this case the flour may have been slightly too hydrated, and the stones of my grinder may have snuck apart on me and may need adjustment again.  That was a main factor behind the epic Emmer disaster. The other factor was over-hydration, and the two may go together.  Under-ground wheat = less water needed for making the sponge.  If one does not adjust for that, it's a soggy, grainy mess that doesn't rise.  I'll try again, but will go back to 50% for a while in the meantime.

Canning Dry Beans

I've posted before about cooking dry beans (primarily pinto, but my favorite is cranberry).  Beans keep a long time when dry, but they eventually become difficult to cook; the solution that has worked best for me is pressure cooking.

Another alternative is to can them.  Now that I'm using my pressure canner, that is an option.  Canning beans offers no advantage over storing dry with the exception that they are ready to eat without further preparation.  Canned beans certainly won't last longer than dry beans in terms of storage life (the latter are good for 30 years, if "dislike slightly" is good enough).

There are numerous sites that describe canning beans, but one thing is striking: most describe canning plain beans.  The NCHFP does have a recipe for canning beans with tomato or molasses sauce that optionally includes adding a small amount of bacon or pork.  As I've noted previously, when making a pot of beans for immediate use (or for freezing) I add onion, garlic, and bacon to the mix.

I decided to give my normal recipe a try.  The amount of bacon per jar would be comparable to that suggested by the NCHFP site, although my precise recipe isn't listed--the one featuring the bacon includes tomato or molasses, which is not the flavor I was going for at all (I cut up a pound of bacon for the batch, which worked out to about one ounce per jar--somewhat more than the 3/4 inch cube in the NCHFP recipe).

The NCHFP site recommends an overnight or quick soak, followed by 30 minutes' worth of boiling before putting in the jars.  The extra boiling might be justified if it helps the beans absorb more water so that they are fully hydrated.  But that level of cooking obviously isn't needed for tenderness: the beans process for 75-90 minutes at 240 degrees.  That cooks them very well.

I soaked three pounds of cranberry beans overnight, then poured off the water and added the onion, garlic, and bacon, placing them straight into the jars--similar to the process suggested by The Prairie Homestead.

I had some fresh onion, but not enough for the whole batch, so I hydrated some dried minced onion, following the process previously described.  Then it was just a matter of filling the jars, first with beans, then with water, to about the 1" of headspace line.

The NCHFP suggests 5 pounds of beans for 7 quarts (or 14 pints); The Prairie Homestead got more than 1 pound in each quart jar.  But these recipes don't include the onion or bacon.  I ended up with about 17 pints' worth of bean mix.  This was somewhat unfortunate, because my All American 921 canner cannot hold that many widemouth jars (various sites indicate the capacity is 19 pints, but that is based on standard-mouth jars, which are narrower--relatively few sites break the capacity down by different jar types, but those that do suggest the max capacity with widemouths is 16 pints).  In the picture, you'll see that I had one standard-mouth jar.  As I kept filling and filling and filling...I realized I was going to need all the space I had and then some.  Unfortunately, I could only find one empty standard-mouth jar.  I mostly use widemouths, though I have a number of standard-mouth jars--they were just all full of peach and blueberry preserves.   I was only able to get 15 jars into the canner, 7 below and 8 on top.

I processed them for about 80 minutes at 10 pounds.  When they came out of the canner, it was obvious they'd leaked a little, but not much: the water in the bottom of the canner looked (very) slightly cloudy and the jars had some fat-slickness to them.

After they cooled down, the liquid level inside the jars did recede quite a bit--In this case, I don't think it was all leakage, because all of the jars were low and there was nowhere near that amount in the bottom of the canner.  I think the fluid level dropped simply due to it being absorbed by the beans.  Although some of the beans appear to be high and dry in the picture, they are still tender (and cooked to perfection).

I'll probably still mostly cook beans for immediate use going forward, occasionally freezing one or two meals' worth.  However, canning does expand the opportunity to use them. Cooking a batch of beans is a big endeavor, and I don't always have the time when I would otherwise eat some.  Now I have them if I want them.  One pint is about the right quantity for one meal.

Steaming Eggs

I have had some trouble hard-boiling eggs.  Eggs that are relatively fresh can be hard to peel.  One solution is to age them, but then they lose nutrients.  My solution for years has been to hold them for a while, then boil.  So far, I haven't had any go bad, but I have had a couple float.  I have tossed those.

One solution that I've seen a few places, such as The Prairie Homestead, is to steam them (I used to have an electric egg cooker that did the same thing; my parents had a Jurassic one that probably dated to the 1960s).  Generally the instructions for stovetop steaming call for atmospheric steaming for 20 minutes (i.e., non-pressurzied, although The Prairie Homestead has directions for pressure cooking them in the shell via Instant Pot, too).

I decided to give this a try.  I got a set of steamers cheap off Amazon, then loaded the eggs into the pot.  I was able to make them in the same pot with the same quantity that I usually use.

I had a hunch that they would need less than 20 minutes; Jill Winger is at over 6000 feet in elevation.  However, for the first try, I steamed them for 20.

After boiling, I typically quench them with cold water, to which I have added ice.  That was still doable, although ice cube placement was more tricky with the steamer.

The verdict:  early indications are that it works as well as advertised.  The first half dozen peeled beautifully, although the yolks were a bit over-done.  I eventually determined that 10 minutes at under 1000 feet of elevation worked fine. Nine minutes is okay, too, but some of the yolks are a little doughy (which can be good or bad depending on what you like).  This should've been obvious at the outset based on the data from atmospheric steam canning: steam times are the same as boiling times (a point also made by Lisa Steele recently at Fresh Eggs Daily). I had settled on about 8:45 for boiled eggs after experimentation.

Steaming does not guarantee success.  Some eggs still are hard to peel (though not many, about ten percent in my limited experience so far), and I have had one egg break while steaming--though this happens with boiling, too, with about the same likelihood (so far I have had 1 of 35 or so break).

So steaming definitely seems superior to boiling in most respects.  It'll be the method I use going forward.