Chicken Butchering

Make sure your tools are ready. You need a sharp hatchet or ax, a place to chop their heads off (for me, this is two nails a chicken head's width apart in a log), a pot of hot water, something to singe with, a clean sink to do the gutting in, and a place to cool them and age them. Keep in mind, this isn't the only way to do this, but it works for me and I've probably done it more than anyone else you know.
Select a rooster. I usually do two or four at a time. One is not enough for our family a meal, and more than four is tiresome without a lot of help. Which you'll see, I have some help for parts of this that really need more than two hands.

Actually, you've selected the roosters the night before last and put them separately and given them free choice water but no food. It is much easier and cleaner to gut something who's gut isn't full.
This is the hard part. Take your warm, breathing chicken and with its legs in your left hand, put its head between the nails. This is a bit of a hard fit. Then you stretch the legs out behind so the rooster is stuck there. Don't worry, he's not there long and if you know anything about chickens, you know they get real calm when held upside down. Then in one determined chop, hit as close behind the nails as you can. Don't be alarmed if the head doesn't entirely sever -- he's dead anyway.

And the first time you do it, you'll swear he isn't dead. He'll flop. I keep a hold on his feet while he does the worst of it. You don't want them bruising if you can help it, and held upside down they bleed out a bit better. After most of the flopping is done, I put him in down (in something usually, it could be a box but right now I'm using a roll of fence wire that happens to be there -- they fit neatly in the woven square and upside down too) and go get the next one. I usually chop two at a time, no more, no less. It just makes the timing work out better.

After chopping the second one's head off, I take the first one and scald him. I've heated this water hot before I came outside, and I brought the water with me then. Its exact temperature matters less than your judgment -- if the water is hotter, hold him in there less long. I think I've never had it seriously too hot because it has to wait on me to kill them. If I'm doing two sets of roosters I probably have two pots of hot water though because I don't think it would stay hot enough through four roosters. Notice how you hold him so absolutely all his feathers are in the water.

The feathers that take the most scalding are the wing and tail feathers so if you can grab them and they come out right away, he's scalded enough. The other feathers will literally come out by the handfull. Strip from top to bottom. After the feathers come out, the pin feathers come out and you have to go back and get those. None of this should be hard. It takes a while and it might feel like it will never get done, but it will. Think about roast chicken or something pleasant.

Here I am going for the wing pit feathers! Look at those scrawny drumsticks! These are not meat chickens (they are "dual purpose" black sex links) and they don't look or eat like it. I won't raise meat breed chickens because I did once. They are not healthy chickens.

Here I have recruited a daughter to help with the last of the pin feathers.

Singing is mostly for the hairs. These chickens didn't have many hairs. Here we are using a fagot of dead pine branchlets. It was windy and we were having a hard time. The flame should be bigger. We used rolled up newspaper on the next one.

Ok. We're inside now and they've been washed off and the feet cut off. He's beginning to get stiff. There is a place right under the anus that you can cut into and not cut anything you don't want to. That's where I make my first cut.

I stick my finger in that first cut and work my way around. With some chickens you can almost pull the anus loose but this one I had to cut. You want a really sharp knife for this so you don't have to use much pressure to cut so you won't cut yourself or the chicken's guts.

Once the anus is loose, I just pull it out some and stick my hand up in and tear the membranes that attach the guts to the inside of the carcass. It is work around, work around, work around, feel, work around, pull a bit, work around. In the above photo I've got the guts started out but I'm now way up in there working the windpipe loose. With the head off, you just pull everything out the rear end. Rinse the bird and put him where it is cool.

These are the edible parts of the guts. They come out attached together. That's the gizzard on the left, the liver in the middle, and the heart on the right. Be careful as the bile duct is attached to the liver and it is a trick to cut out. Not hard. But don't leak bile on anything. Usually I can get it without leaking bile at all. But gosh darned if I can figure out how to describe how I do that. It isn't hard and you can see how to do it when you see it. Just cut out a little of the liver to make sure you don't cut into the bile duct.

I just take the heart out of the membrane and maybe trim the top of it if it has any length of blood vessel on it.

Now, the gizzard. This is a delicacy in these parts. The gizzard is, essentially, a birds teeth -- where it grinds its food up. So this muscle is strong. Both sides of the gut will be attached to this and you have to cut them loose. The gizzard is a flattened oval shape and you need to cut around the longest circumference. But not all the way around, just 3/4 or a little more.

When you do and you open the gizzard up, you will find stuff. This one had hay it looked like, and sand which is what they've had for grit. I dumped this blog out (in the chicken bucket, not in the sink).

Now what you have is the gizzard opened up. Rinse this then take off the inside membrane. Very easy to do. You can save the innards until you have enough for a whole innard meal or you can fix it when you fix the rest of the chicken. We plan to roast these chickens and will just roast these innards with them.
There was a time when people were a tiny bit more in touch with their food than now and they knew that aging meat was a good thing. Most meat needs to be aged. Period. And I acknowledge that "aging" is a euphemism for rotting, just a bit. The meat drawer is a good aging chamber. I put the chickens in a light brine (I don't measure, just water and salt) and put them (in a bowl because the bags always leak eventually) in the meat drawer. Minimum of two days. I don't know what the maximum would be but I'd guess a week wouldn't hurt them. We usually end up eating them the third day.

There ya have it. There is something deeply spiritual about this whole process. I know it doesn't come through in the description but it never fails to move me. We cared for these chickens every day for 16 weeks. It was breathing in my arms. It looked at me as it was dying. I thanked its spirit. I learned things about it from how tight its innards were to what its gizzard held. We raised it, we killed it, and we will eat it consciously, deliberately, examinedly, and with principle.