Freezer Camp

We started at about 8AM on a Saturday morning. T.J. set up the station the night before so we were ready to go. We did have to wait a little bit for the big pot of water to heat up so that we could dunk the chickens in.
I have killed/cleaned a few birds in my lifetime, but never on this scale. In AK I would do a little Spruce Hen hunting and then I would have maybe 2 or 3 birds that I needed to take care of. They are small and easy to do. Chickens? 30 of them? That's a little bit more work. We read up on how to mass butcher and we read that "containing" the chicken and then taking a small knife and sticking that in the beak and into the brain, then cutting the throat was a better way to do it then the old chopping block way. The knife to the brain was so that the feathers would release better. I have to say, I think that this is the way to go. It was nice not to have chickens with their heads off running around, spraying blood every were and also it was much cleaner.

We set up wheel barrows under the chickens to collect the blood and then we just had to rinse them out. Also, I was impressed with out the feathers came out. Really, all you had to do was run your hand down the chicken and the feathers just came out, really no plucking other then around the legs and around the joints.

T.J. did the killing ( But I did do three of them) and most of the plucking, while I did all the gutting and some plucking. I gutted as I have smaller hands and it was easier for me to get in the chicken and get all the "stuff" out.

It took about six hours to do all the chickens, then we placed them in the refrigerator over night and the next day we spent about six hours doing a fine cleaning and cutting them up if we wanted them whole or cut up. Then they went to freezer camp. One came back from freezer camp and we welcomed her home with a roasting pan. She was tasty!