Chicken Pluckin

Saturday morning we commenced our first chicken plucking adventure. Todd, Jana, Chris, K and I went to the Search and Rescue fundraiser breakfast and then started our plucking set up. We put up canopies in the backyard an assembled our stations. We had to do some fine tuning on our Mother Plucker but she finally was ready for the test!

This is what the outside looks like. 

 and the inside. Full of rubber plucking fingers

 This was the killing table. Cant get more high tech than that.. old road cones, a 4 wheeler ramp and two blue barrels held down by sandbags.

This was Todds station. He was the only one of us who had done this before. His job was the killer aka bleeder.

 My job was catcher. I had to catch every single damn chicken by hand and carry them up to the killing table. Kennedy helped me. Yeah I know Im looking hot in muck boots, shorts and an apron. It was hot and messy! 

 The chicken is put upside down in the cone with its head poking through and a bucket under neath to catch the blood. You slice their throats from the inside and let them bleed out into the buckets.

We had to take a picture with our first completely processed chicken. 

 From there it was game on! We had to do a little tweaking a few times with the plucker but we got it running good. Our backyard was a party! Hunter stopped by for a few minutes. Liz and Kyle found out what we were doing and came out to help. Taylor made the mistake of stopping by on his dirt bike and we put him straight to work. Justin and Kyle were driving past and stopped to say hi. They were surprised at our operation. Then one of Dads fire fighters Don saw it on FaceBook and came just to see how our plucker worked.  

 Koree supervised. We put her in the car seat so she couldnt get near the fires. She was well fed with cheetos, oreos and capri suns 

 Liz took step by step pictures to show the process. First the bird is taken to the table where its killed. Once its dead its taken from the cones of death...

 Over to the hot tub. The water is about 170 degrees and its dipped for just about 10 seconds

Its pulled from there and carried to the plucker

 Where the bottom white part spins fast. You spray it with water and it knocks all the feathers off.

 The feathers and water drain out a hole in the side. This is how naked the chicken comes out after about 20 seconds of plucking.

 Then its taken to the table for any additional detailing thats needed.

From the table it goes to the gutters. Heads and feet are cut off, insides removed.

Then it gets washed out very well.

and dropped into these nifty sealer bags dad found. 

They get wrapped up

Put into the second pot and dropped into the first of hot water.

After just a few seconds it seals all around the chicken and is pulled out of the water.

 Its placed on a cooler of ice so it can cool down before being put into the freezer.

 We had 46 birds done and stuffed into the freezer before we knew it! Some of the fatties were huge!!

I know a lot of people are thinking eww gross! I cant believe theyd do that. We have raised these chickens from 1 week old. We know exactly what theyve eaten, how theyve been raised, how they were killed and how the meat was handled. You cant get more organic than that!!