Chicken Tales

Lots going on here lately and plenty of it blog worthy, now if only there was a bit more time in the day to share these goings on.

A month ago we butchered 3 of our 8 roosters that we were fattening to eat, today we dispatched the other 5.  It was much better than the first lot, I must have got my mojo back.
The roosters pen now vacated had a 6 square metre patch of bare earth and I decided that I would turn it over and plant it out with clucker tucker (a mix of seeds that will provide great forage for the chickens in a few months time) and some pigeon pea.
But before planting it out I thought the chickens could do some of the hard work for me.  So after turning the soil I left the big clods to the chickens and they got to work breaking them down and picking out all the goodies they could find.

Even the bantams who have both gone clucky got in on the act so there must have been some good bugs in the soil.

Anything interesting happening in your chicken pen?

Butchering Roosters - Any Tips?

Over the weekend we butchered 3 of the 8 roosters we have been rearing for meat.

 
I have to say that it was not as smooth sailing as it has been in the past and I am glad there were only 3 to do.  I am not sure why I felt weird about it but I did, my chicken butchering mojo was off.
The last lot of chickens we butchered were a specific meat breed and had been sexed so they were all females.  As I discovered today female chickens are much easier to deal with when it comes to plucking and gutting.
The large tail feathers and well developed wing feathers were a bugger to deal with and additional dunking in the hot water did not seem to help at all.
Then when it came to gutting them I discovered that their body shape, with a much smaller opening between the end of their breast bone and tail, made it a lot trickier.  It was really tricky trying to get the insides out easily.
In the end these 3 ended up skinned and split into portions as it was easier but I would love to know if anyone has any tips or tricks for butchering roosters.  Or have you encountered the same isues?

The Worst Neighbours?

There is a good chance that we are committing a massive sin when it comes to being a good neighbour.  We have just purchased 8 roosters from a local chicken dealer and most of them are crowing.  So in addition to the 2 roosters we already had that makes 10.
However there is a chance that we could get away with it.  We do live in the country and everyone in the street has their own rooster so we are hoping that the extra crowing will just blend in.

These roosters are all destined for the dinner table and the 4 larger ones will be the first to go in a month or so.  We will be feeding them on broiler finishing food which is about 28% protein so they will bulk up quicker that if we fed them mixed grain (10% protein) or layers mash (15% protein).

 Hopefully we will have cut down the numbers before anyone complains (which I don't think they will) and then we can rest easy (in more ways than one).

Have you ever done something that would make you sound like a bad neighbour?

A Meat Chicken Wrap Up

Over the weekend we killed the last 5 of our meat chickens so now that we have finished I thought it would be a good time to share our experience in a bit more detail (don't worry no gory photos).
Just to refresh here are the facts.
We started off with 14, week old, commercial meat chicks ($30) and a 20kg bag of chick starter ($18).

They grew very quickly and right from the start there were some that were much bigger that others. Sadly 2 chicks died early on, we are pretty sure they got too cold which is always a potential issue with chicks.

All they did was eat and poop and they did a lot of both.  They grew very quickly and were fully feathered in 2 weeks. It was becoming obvious why they were used by commercial growers.  We purchased a second bag of chick starter when the chicks were 4 weeks old.   The chicks end up pooping into their food so you loose a bit just trying to keep their food clean.

Check out the size difference.

At 5 weeks they looked weird, with over sized breasts and short legs.  They also did not really behave like chickens.  I was now very clear why these birds were used by commercial farms.  They were huge!!
Although we planned to keep ours a few weeks longer than the standard 7 weeks that commercial farms farms finish at, they really were ready to go.

As they got older they started to act and look more like chickens, albeit very chunky chickens.  They had access to grass and clucker tucker at all times and they loved to just lie in the sun and eat.  

We then purchased a bag of broiler finisher ($19) to get the chickens to the butchering stage.  I investigated a number of different food options because I was really not sure what was different about the broiler finisher compared to the grain or layers mask we buy for our laying hens.  I discovered that the broiler finisher ($19) was 22% protein compared to15% for layers mash ($14) and 11% for mixed grain ($11).  As it got towards the end we decided not to spend the extra money on a second bag of finisher so instead we did a 50/50 mix of grain and finisher for the last week and a half.  The back of the bag advised the broiler finisher should not be fed to laying hens and I was a bit puzzled at the time but now I have a theory.

You see when we butchered the first chicken it was 7 weeks old an weighed in at 1.3 kg and the meat did not have any more fat that a store brought bird.  The next 6 that we butchered a week later were definitely bigger and weighed in at an average of 1.7kg.  They also had a fat deposits on different parts of their bodies (across the breast and back) and a bit of fat under the skin around their rear end/cloaca.  The last 5 that we killed 2 weeks after the first were heavy weights.  They averaged 1.95kg and the 2 heaviest weighed in at 2.2 kg and 2.3 kg dressed weight (plucked, gutted and ready to cook).  Not only were they that much heavier but they were fat.  They had fat in all the same places at the 6 the week before but there was more of it and it was surrounding their organs and thick around their rear ends.  This is why I think there is a warning not too feed the broiler food to layers.  I know that if laying hens get too fat they have trouble laying so the higher protein food could really cause issues.

The heavy weights from the last batch

 All of the chicken has now been portioned out and packed away and we are looking forward to home grown meals ahead.

The conclusion that we have come to is that we will no be purchasing some Light Sussex eggs and repeating the process so that we have a even playing field to compare the two methods.  Using the Light Sussex will take longer but we will not have to buy the chicks or be stuck to a very tight time schedule for when we have to kill the chickens like you have to with the commercial breeds.
But that is another story and for another day.

Home Grown Chicken - The Taste Test

Back on the 14th of this month we had a trial run at butchering our own chicken and I have been meaning to write about the finished product but life (read work) got in the way.
After finishing the butchering we chilled the chicken in the fridge for 48 hours to let the muscles relax.  I decided to roast the chicken whole but with minimum flavouring so we could really taste the flavour of the meat.  I roasted the chicken in an oven bag with salt, pepper and lemon myrtle flavoured olive oil.

The result was delicious!!!
I have to say that I had forgotten that chicken was supposed to taste like, well chicken.  Hubby commented that I should have used a non flavoured oil so we could get more chicken flavour but have he was still flawed by the flavour.
I can only describe it by saying, if you imagine the flavour of the thigh meat, of the best tasting free range organic chicken you ever had, then that is how the (normally tasteless) breast meat tasted.  It took me back to my childhood in the 80's when chicken was not consumed as frequently as it is today and the chicken we ate was definitely more flavoursome.

Now we are really looking forward to having some more of our own chickens in the freezer.  Over the next 2 weekends we will be dealing with the remaining 11 chickens so that should keep us going for a while.

Butchering Meat Chickens - A Trial Run

Before you read any further I will let you know there are no gruesome photos of headless chickens in this post.  If anyone wants to see step by step butchering pictures there are plenty on the net and since I am a novice I have no words of wisdom to impart just our experiences on the day.

Our Meat Chickens have now reached 7 weeks of age and this is the age that they would be butchered if they were in a commercial poultry farm.
We plan to keep ours slightly longer, probably an extra 2-3 weeks but will will see how things go.
Today was all about a trial run of the butchering process.  It was actually really good to have the trial run with just one chicken, so now we have a much better understanding of how long it takes, what we need to  have organised and any potential pitfalls.
The trial run was some what forced upon us as one of the chickens had an issue with one of it's legs that we could see was going to get worse.  We were aware that this was a potential issue with the commercial birds but unlike a large commercial operation we are not going to just leave that one bird to suffer because the rest are not ready.

This is the first time hubby has had any part in butchering chickens and for someone who grew up in the middle of Brisbane he has taken to it very well.  I grew up in the country and as a child took part in butchering our own chickens. This was back in the 80's and I was pretty young so other than seeing them run around without their heads (which of course we thought was hilarious) and plucking them there is not a lot I remember.

We set ourselves up outside on an out door table with:
The BBQ set up with a pot of scaling water and a thermometer,
A few layers of news paper taped to the table,
Instructions taped to the table,
A Stainless steel bowl, sharp knife, paper towels, latex gloves and a chopping board.

Set up ready to go

This preparation made the job a lot easier

I found these instructions on the net and used them as my guide.

My instructions taped to the table for easy reference

We looked at a few options for the actual killing.  We were going to use a killing cone but after attempting to modify a plastic road cone we discovered that the cone was too narrow to fit the chicken.  We ended up using an old pillow case with the corner cut out which allowed us to keep the wings contained and the axe on the chopping block method.


It was a good time of year to be doing this as there were no flies to worry about, the weather was cool and we had no interruptions.  These are all things that I believe are important here in Queensland and Hubby and I discussed the fact that it would not be a god idea to raise birds that would need to be butchered in the summer dues to these factors.
The instructions mentioned the need to be careful not to break the bile duct if you wanted to eat the liver as it would make it taste bitter.  Not being familiar with the anatomy of a chicken I did not even know which bit  the bile duct was, till I broke it.  Thankfully it broke after I had removed all of the intestines outside of the bird, not that we were going to eat the liver anyway.

The bright green bile

It all went well and for this time we skinned the chicken.  We will not skin all of the chickens in the future but we decided this one we would.  It weighed 1.3kg after we had cleaned it all up. Now it needs to chill in the fridge for 48 hours before we eat it so that the muscles have time to relax, or so I am told.

The finished product

I am interested in hearing about any one elses experiences so please feel free to leave a link in the comments section if you have written about it or know of any good sources of information on the topic.

Meat Chickens - Out an About

Well the meat chickens are out and about and loving it.

They have their own yard separate from our egg laying chickens but within the same large enclosure.

Before we ordered the meat chickens I removed a large section of the grass from what would be their yard and planted out a patch of Clucker Tucker that I ordered through a local company Green Harvest.  Clucker Tucker is a mix of barrel medic, bok choy, buckwheat, forage chicory, clover, cocksfoot, linseed, lucerne, millet, forage plantain, silverbeet, subclover and sunflower. Most have vigorous root systems that will quickly regrow leaves that are eaten and will tolerate a bit of scratching once established.

You can see the patch of Clucker Tucker planted out on the left of the below photo.

The chickens like to lie in the sun amongst the Clucker Tucker.

They do scratch in the dirt a bit but not like our other chickens.

The next two photos were taken about a week ago when the chickens were six weeks old.  As you can see they are huge for their age and very un-attractive.

My best friend visited today and she had not seen the meat chickens before but she summed them up quite well.  She said they look inbred.  I think that pretty much sums them up.  

There is something just not right about them.  They sort of look like chickens and sort of behave like chickens, but anyone who has has a flock of laying chickens would see straight away that they are are just not normal chickens.

This has been quite a learning experience so far and the final tests will be at the end of the process when it comes to butchering and eating.

We will do a tally at the end to see exactly how much it has cost us to produce each bird but we are almost  100% convinced we will choose a heavy heritage breed for meat in the future.  So now we are looking at which breeds might be suitable.

Meat Chickens - An Update

This post is a bit delayed and since these photos were taken the chickens have grown a lot and I will no doubt be posting about them again very soon.
So where are we at with the journey and what have we learnt so far.
Well I can tell you one thing for sure, these little buggers eat a lot!  In fact all they do is eat, poop, drink and sleep.
We are really treating this as an experiment in a a number of areas:
How do we feel about raising our own meat and butchering it ourselves?
How do we feel about a commercial breed vs a heritage breed for meat?
How much does it actually cost? Does this save us any money
What are the yeilds from the birds?
What is the meat vs fat ratio?
And importantly how do they taste?
It will be a while before we can answer all of these questions but we have already made some observations.

"What you lookin at?"

There are some behaviours that these chickens exhibit that I think has to do with the comercial breed and the rate at which they grow.  They seem to need to streatch a lot for one thing and you often see the streaching out a wing or leg.  Now I have to be realistic in the fact that we do not usually spend as much time looking at baby chickens (these ones spent a few weeks inside) and perhaps all little chickens spend time stretching but I am not convinced it would be so often.

They also seem to spend a heck of a lot of time sitting down.  This is something we knew to expect as the commercial breeds are so heavy.

It is always dinner time.

One final thing that has become obvious is that there can be big differences in the size between some of the chickens.  They were all hatched over two days but some of the chicks are twice the size of others.  Check out the difference between the three in the photo below.

The chicks are now living in their outside residence and I am quite glad to have them, the noise and (yes mum) the smell gone.  We have had some cool weather lately so they still have a light to keep them warm but this week should be the last week for that too since they are now fully feathered.

NB Apologies if there are spelling mistakes but blogger does not want to check it for me, grrrr.