Saturday was the processing day and Sunday was packaging day. We killed, scalded, plucked, and cleaned on Saturday. This is a picture of the cones we used. There are two on each side. We have 8 cones total but only used 4 this time, since we were only processing 26 birds.
Doing the dirty deed.
Scalding
Our plucker doing it's job
We purchased a used Featherman Pro Plucker, and it does a wonderful job. They birds came out with only a few feathers still attached but I think that was because we either didn't scald them long enough or we didn't run the plucker long enough. But I remember plucking chickens by hand when I was a kid and trust me, this is the way to go!
We cut 10 chickens into parts including boneless skinless breast. 2 chickens were in the scalder just a little too long so they went straight into the crockpots and now we have 3 bags of shredded chicken in the freezer and had a chicken casserole last night. All the others were left whole. We have a few of them sold. We marked 10 of them for sale but I hope all 10 don't sell. I would like to keep enough to get us through until Spring when we raise some more.
It was a lot of work, but well worth it. We have chickens in our freezer that we know where they came from, how they were treated, and what they were fed. We also know that they were processed cleanly.
Have a great day!
Mae
