Which came first? The chicken or…the cutlet?

I remember very distinctly when my 6-year-old son realized that the chicken on his plate is really A Chicken! As in a bird, a farm animal, a living, breathing thing.  It surprised me that his young mind hadn’t realized that by the name alone, and then I began to think about all the ways that we, as Americans, try to distance ourselves from “the ugly truth”.  The meats that we eat are almost always unrecognizable as the living thing it once was.  We hide the truth with Styrofoam and plastic wrap, with gleaming and brightly lit supermarkets.  We only use the parts that don’t remind us that it was once alive.

It was then that I started to really think about where my food came from.  I had spent the last 29 years of my life eating meat, but never really thinking about what it was.  I gluttonously consumed chicken, pork, beef and lamb without one single thought about the life that had been sacrificed for it.  I discarded fat and gristle, and portions I was too full to finish.  I turned my nose to the gizzards, heart and liver.  I bought my chicken already in pieces to save myself the horror of cutting it myself.  At 6 years old my son came to a realization that it took me 29 years and an insightful child to see.

We started raising pigs a few years ago and as an animal lover, (who am I kidding?? animal, bug, bird, fish…they are all my pets) it was so difficult for me to raise them knowing what the outcome would be.  I cried and coached my way through that first experience, but came away from it feeling really good that the meat that filled my freezer and fed my family was healthy and had been happy.  With that first experience and the ones that followed, we did the raising and loving and someone else (the slaughterhouse) did the “dirty work”.

This last spring we decided to raise meat birds with a group of friends.  Meat birds are a breed of chicken that are bred and raised solely for the purpose of meat.  We had raised meat birds the previous spring and had loaded them up and brought them to a place that processes them.  Again, we let someone else take the burden of truth from our shoulders.  We were very unhappy with the quality of the meat.  The meat was flavorful, but tough as a boiled owl!  After eight weeks and countless bags of grain and buckets of lugged water, the finished product stunk.  Very disappointing.  My husband vowed that we would never do meat birds again.  The whole year we had to grin and bear our way through 30 chickens that you could scarcely cut with a knife.  But, we refused to waste it!! These had been living, breathing things that we had invested time and money and sweat into.  At least we had learned that much.

After a lot of research and a lot of convincing, we decided to try it again.  We ordered the chicks directly from a supplier, and selected two different breeds. A Cornish Rock cross, which is a cross between a Cornish and a Plymouth Rock.  A large white bird, this is the most commonly used meat bird and the breed we had raised the previous year.  The other was a Freedom Ranger.  A large red bird that is raised for its foraging ability.  Both breeds take a surprisingly short 6-8 weeks from hatch to slaughter size.

Meat Birds are a kind of freak of nature bird.  They grow alarmingly fast, and get so body heavy that their feet are massive in order to carry the weight…and sometimes, their feet cannot carry their weight.  They are not inclined to forage like laying breeds and I find them to be a bit lazy and kind of dinosaur-like.  Because we had selected a “foraging” breed, we built a chicken tractor to raise our birds in.  A chicken tractor is basically a mobile pen.  We used an old trampoline frame, covered with chicken wire and a tarp to keep them dry.  Each day we would move the pen to a fresh, clean, green piece of field.

Because we had been so unhappy with the outcome of our last attempt at meat birds, we did some research and decided to do the slaughter ourselves.  Yikes!!  The dirty work would now be on us, and I was very uncomfortable with the idea.  I had never killed anything, or gutted anything or plucked feathers.  I had never even witnessed anything like that!! But I was determined to give it a shot.  For the sake of the meat quality, but also I could be sure that these animals were treated with respect and care.

When slaughter day arrived, we got up early and began preparing for a full day of work.  We had rented a “scalder” and a “plucker” to assist us in the process.  We had 75 birds to slaughter and process and seven adults, five of which had never experienced anything like this.  We got right to work.

First, we would gather 6 birds and place them in a holding area that would be easy and convenient to catch them in.  Next came the hardest part, selecting the birds and placing them head-down, alive in a “kill cone”.  By turning the birds upside down it temporarily stuns them as the blood rushes to their head, and  kind of puts them in a trance like state.  Next the throat is cut at the main artery so that the birds bleed out.  This serves two purposes.  It is easier and less violent than chopping their head off and letting them run around the yard (and yes, that really does happen) and it also drains the blood from their body so that the gutting part is less messy.

Once most of the blood is drained from the body, the bird is removed from the kill cone and immediately dipped into the “scalder”.  The scalder is a large pot of water that is heated to 140 degrees.  By dipping the bird into the hot water briefly and removing it and then dipping again, it loosens the feathers and makes the tedious process of removing feathers a bit easier.  Once the feathers started to pull out easier, we hand plucked the larger feathers and then put the birds, two at a time, into the “plucker”.  The plucker is a large drum that has a lot of rubber “fingers” on the inside, as it spins the feathers are rubbed away by the fingers and water from a garden hose.

Once the feathers have been removed, the birds must be cooled quickly.  The heat of their internal organs, if left uncooled would spoil the meat.  We used 55 gallon metal, food safe drums filled with ice water to cool the birds.

When the birds were sufficiently cool, the gutting began.  I found this part to be the most fascinating part of the process.  I learned a lot of really interesting information as we began to gut the chickens.  First, we would cut off the head and feet with a very large cleaver.  Cutting through the neck bones was harder than I anticipated.   Next the chickens were lined up on our butcher table.  Chickens have a strange, small gland at the base of their tail which needs to be removed.   After that, we would carefully cut around the anus, being careful not to puncture the intestines and spill feces into the bird cavity.

Once we had access to the cavity, we would reach in and carefully remove the organs.  Chickens have a very interesting organ called a gizzard, that is filled with sand and grit.  The gizzard muscles contract and relax causing the sand inside to grind the food they’ve consumed into digestible pieces.  Fascinating!! We would split the gizzards open and clean all of the sand and grass and debris from the organ.  In one gizzard we found a small Christmas lightbulb!!  Chickens, apparently do not have a very  selective palate!  The bile duct must be cut carefully from the liver, as to not spill green, toxic bile on the organ.  We were not always successful in that, and a few livers had to be discarded.

We cleaned and saved the necks and all of the organs, except for the intestines and windpipe.  Once the birds were gutted they went back into an ice bath for 24 to 48 hrs.  After the cooling time, we packaged and butchered our chickens into breast, legs, thighs and wings and into the freezer they went.

It was a long day, full of new and strange and uncomfortable experiences.  But at the end of the day, tired and messy we had 75 birds that we had not only raised with healthy food and a healthy environment, we also had raised and slaughtered them with care and respect.  We all felt really good about that.  It was an amazing experience, one I will gladly do again….but, how would the meat taste??

Amazing!! Tender and juicy and flavorful!