Butchering Day

I butchered the roosters from our flock of White Rocks today. I think the pullets are glad to see them gone, the randy bastards. This was our experiment in raising heritage purebreds as opposed to hybrid broilers for a meat and layer flock. These roosters would have been 4 months old next week and they yielded less meat than the hybrids at 8 weeks. They are much hardier and healthier, however. Out of 50 birds we had one death loss and one escapee who was never heard from again. The jury's still out on what to do next year. It's going to come down to taste. I butchered 18 roosters today plus 2 more a couple weeks ago. We have 28 pullets left.

Since we don't raise meat birds for sale, we can't justify the expense of buying or building a plucker and the truth is we don't typically roast a whole bird anyway. So I use a butchering technique called "breasting" that I learned in a wild game cookbook. It's a very simple and fast way to process chickens that doesn't require the removal of feathers or guts. Here is the step-by-step process with a photo below:

1. Kill the chicken.
2. Cut off the feet. It makes for a better drumstick eating experience if you cut the skin around the joint and pull as many of the tendons as possible out of the leg, leaving them attached to the foot.
3. Cut a hole through the skin only along the breast bone.
4. Peel the skin back, completely exposing the breast, leg, and thigh meat. Be careful not to open the crop. I like to hold the bird in my hand while I do this and let the weight of it help to pull of the skin. With the feet removed, the skin can be pulled off the end of the leg inside out.
5. Cut out the breast meat. This is a lot like filleting a fish.
6. Pop out the hip joint and cut off the leg/thigh quarter.
7. Rinse the pieces of meat and cool in ice water bath.

My daughter took this photo. She's a little short to get a good perspective but this shows the exposed breast, leg, and thigh ready for cutting out.

There are some obvious pros and cons to this technique but for us the pros outwiegh the cons. It seems like there is a lot of waste but let me tell you, in the spring of 2008 this "waste" is going to the richest compost on Liberty Farm. Not having skin on the meat is a con - if one enjoys eating chicken skin. We don't. In the spring, summer and fall we eat most of our chicken barbequed and in the winter we eat it baked with some sort of sauce or gravy or pan-fried.