Chicken Harvest - Part 2 (or, There Will Be Blood)
This is getting to be a long post. I had a bunch of photos I wanted to post but I split it up so that Part 1 has the milder photos and this post gets more into the details of the blood and guts. So...this one's not for the squeamish.
Cleaned and packaged chicken hearts and feet.
WARNING: The rest of this post contains photos that you might not want to see.
Here's the back of the plucking machine after a few hours. Lots and lots of feathers.
When we get our carcass, the first thing to do was to look it over and pluck out any feathers that the machine missed. When the water in the scalding tank got too cool, then more stray feathers would need to be plucked out. You could pluck with your fingers or use needle-nose pliers to grip the feathers at their base and pull them out.
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These notes are more for myself in case I go back again. After removing any stray feathers, next step was to cut a vertical line down the skin of the neck and try to separate the skin from the bulk of the neck. There will be two tubes kind of stuck to the skin. Those two tubes are the esophagus and trachea. Avoiding those tubes, cut off the neck and toss that into a bucket of ice. Loosen the tubes from the neck skin. Next, place the chicken on its back with the neck hole pointed away from you. Make a small horizontal cut at the base. Slide fingers in and find the tube (the large intestine I think). Cut a vertical line down from the middle of the horizontal first cut, taking care not to sever that tube. At this point, it's not uncommon for some fecal matter to squeeze out. Try not to get too grossed out and just rinse it off. Continue cutting down and around that tube in a J-shape so that it's separated from the rest of the body.
Once you've cut around that hole in the chicken's rear end (called the cloaca), reach into the cavity with your hand and try to loosen everything. I found it tiring to stand in one spot for hours, cutting and gutting and rinsing. I longed for a sharper knife. The emailed instructions before you went had mentioned that you were free to bring your own knives if you had any you preferred. I thought that was an odd statement but I soon learned what a pain it was to cut up chickens with a dull knife. I was already clumsily slow. The dull knife just made it worse.
Reach in and grip that whole mass in there and pull firmly in one smooth motion. Out will come all the guts along with those two tubes that had been in the neck (the trachea and esophogus). Gently poke around the entrails and find the small gall bladder. Be very careful handling this bit. It holds bile and if you accidentally puncture it, a bright neon green liquid spills out, announcing to all who can see that you have botched that cut. Whenever someone accidentally cut the bile duct, we hurriedly rushed to rinse it off to minimize staining the meat with the bile. Cut a little bit of the liver out to try to avoid puncturing the gall bladder when you remove it. Discard gall bladder. Find and cut out the heart, liver, and gizzard and toss them into their respective ice buckets.
Discard the rest of the entrails. Reach back into the cavity and pull out the lungs and discard those too. Rinse off the inside and outside of the bird and then put it into the big tanks of ice water. The holes where we threw out the entrails led to discard buckets. Not sure if there was any more use found for these guts or if they were just thrown out at the end.
While gutting the chickens, I'd occasionally get a chicken that would keep wheezing out protesting clucks. We finally realized that air was passing over the trachea just right to make it sound like the chicken was still clucking. Spooky.
Towards the end, they asked if anyone else wanted to take turns killing chickens. My first chicken went very smoothly. Hold feet, cradle body, hold wing against body, carry to the cones and then place it head first into the cone. Reach below and pull head out through the bottom. Hold the electric knife to the bird's throat. Do not touch the knife to yourself or the metal structure. With the other hand grip head firmly. Now press the button and count 1...2... while electricity passes through the chicken's body and stuns it into rigidity. Slice neck on 3 and release button. Warm blood gushed over my fingers.
After the chickens had gone through the plucking machine, they had their heads and feet cut off and separated into buckets of ice. Eerie to see all those heads.
While we waited for some chickens to be ready to go into the scalding tank, one volunteer said in a hushed voice, "That's something, isn't it? Seeing the life drain out of them like that." His tone was both matter-of-fact and awed at the same time.
Here's a bucket of chicken feet. The yellow bits are some of the skin that didn't come off in the plucking machine.
Here's a bowl of gizzards sitting in ice water, waiting to be cleaned. Chickens have gizzards that act as a kind of mechanical stomach in their digestive tract. Their food gets ground up in their gizzards.
Cutting a gizzard open, we see small pebbles and grit and presumably half digested feed. Yuck. Scooped that out and discarded it.
Here are some cleaned gizzards. See the side with the ridges? That's the inside part that would mash up whatever was inside the gizzard.
Here's a pile of hearts that have been cleaned. The discarded pile of fat and blood is off to the side.
And that's all of the photos. That's where your chicken comes from if you're getting it from this small farm. Again, I don't know how similar this is to bigger chicken slaughterhouses. If you made it through all those photos, thanks for reading.
Cleaned and packaged chicken hearts and feet.
WARNING: The rest of this post contains photos that you might not want to see.
Here's the back of the plucking machine after a few hours. Lots and lots of feathers.
When we get our carcass, the first thing to do was to look it over and pluck out any feathers that the machine missed. When the water in the scalding tank got too cool, then more stray feathers would need to be plucked out. You could pluck with your fingers or use needle-nose pliers to grip the feathers at their base and pull them out.
These notes are more for myself in case I go back again. After removing any stray feathers, next step was to cut a vertical line down the skin of the neck and try to separate the skin from the bulk of the neck. There will be two tubes kind of stuck to the skin. Those two tubes are the esophagus and trachea. Avoiding those tubes, cut off the neck and toss that into a bucket of ice. Loosen the tubes from the neck skin. Next, place the chicken on its back with the neck hole pointed away from you. Make a small horizontal cut at the base. Slide fingers in and find the tube (the large intestine I think). Cut a vertical line down from the middle of the horizontal first cut, taking care not to sever that tube. At this point, it's not uncommon for some fecal matter to squeeze out. Try not to get too grossed out and just rinse it off. Continue cutting down and around that tube in a J-shape so that it's separated from the rest of the body.
Once you've cut around that hole in the chicken's rear end (called the cloaca), reach into the cavity with your hand and try to loosen everything. I found it tiring to stand in one spot for hours, cutting and gutting and rinsing. I longed for a sharper knife. The emailed instructions before you went had mentioned that you were free to bring your own knives if you had any you preferred. I thought that was an odd statement but I soon learned what a pain it was to cut up chickens with a dull knife. I was already clumsily slow. The dull knife just made it worse.
Reach in and grip that whole mass in there and pull firmly in one smooth motion. Out will come all the guts along with those two tubes that had been in the neck (the trachea and esophogus). Gently poke around the entrails and find the small gall bladder. Be very careful handling this bit. It holds bile and if you accidentally puncture it, a bright neon green liquid spills out, announcing to all who can see that you have botched that cut. Whenever someone accidentally cut the bile duct, we hurriedly rushed to rinse it off to minimize staining the meat with the bile. Cut a little bit of the liver out to try to avoid puncturing the gall bladder when you remove it. Discard gall bladder. Find and cut out the heart, liver, and gizzard and toss them into their respective ice buckets.
Discard the rest of the entrails. Reach back into the cavity and pull out the lungs and discard those too. Rinse off the inside and outside of the bird and then put it into the big tanks of ice water. The holes where we threw out the entrails led to discard buckets. Not sure if there was any more use found for these guts or if they were just thrown out at the end.
While gutting the chickens, I'd occasionally get a chicken that would keep wheezing out protesting clucks. We finally realized that air was passing over the trachea just right to make it sound like the chicken was still clucking. Spooky.
Towards the end, they asked if anyone else wanted to take turns killing chickens. My first chicken went very smoothly. Hold feet, cradle body, hold wing against body, carry to the cones and then place it head first into the cone. Reach below and pull head out through the bottom. Hold the electric knife to the bird's throat. Do not touch the knife to yourself or the metal structure. With the other hand grip head firmly. Now press the button and count 1...2... while electricity passes through the chicken's body and stuns it into rigidity. Slice neck on 3 and release button. Warm blood gushed over my fingers.
After the chickens had gone through the plucking machine, they had their heads and feet cut off and separated into buckets of ice. Eerie to see all those heads.
While we waited for some chickens to be ready to go into the scalding tank, one volunteer said in a hushed voice, "That's something, isn't it? Seeing the life drain out of them like that." His tone was both matter-of-fact and awed at the same time.
Here's a bucket of chicken feet. The yellow bits are some of the skin that didn't come off in the plucking machine.
Here's a bowl of gizzards sitting in ice water, waiting to be cleaned. Chickens have gizzards that act as a kind of mechanical stomach in their digestive tract. Their food gets ground up in their gizzards.
Cutting a gizzard open, we see small pebbles and grit and presumably half digested feed. Yuck. Scooped that out and discarded it.
Here are some cleaned gizzards. See the side with the ridges? That's the inside part that would mash up whatever was inside the gizzard.
Here's a pile of hearts that have been cleaned. The discarded pile of fat and blood is off to the side.
And that's all of the photos. That's where your chicken comes from if you're getting it from this small farm. Again, I don't know how similar this is to bigger chicken slaughterhouses. If you made it through all those photos, thanks for reading.