After
Mark killed
our Plymouth Rocks,
I set to work dressing the birds.
We kill so few chickens per year that we pluck by hand rather than
springing for a Whiz-bang Chicken Plucker, and our unskilled fingers
definitely spend more time removing feathers than on any other part of
the dressing
process.
I’ve read that a lot of
small-scale chicken-keepers save time by skinning
their birds rather than plucking but I usually like to
keep the skin on so we can roast our birds to perfection. Since
our Plymouth Rocks were slated to be ground into sausage, though, I
figured this was a good chance to try my hand at skinning.
Unfortunately, my first, unskilled attempt took as long as plucking the
bird. Oops.
I’ve included a drawing
from this very
useful article in
hopes your first skinning operation will go more smoothly than mine
did. But don’t fall into the trap of skinning all of your
chickens — honor your birds by eating as much of their body as you
can.
meat birds is to treat them to a happy life, complete with a homemade chicken
waterer that
dispenses clean water.
why not save the skin to be used for making stock? you could also render it and use the fat in the sausage.
Good point. That’s usually my chicken cycle — roast it, use the leftover meat in various recipes, then use the bones and skin to make stock. My freezer’s chock full of chicken stock right now, though, due to cooking up all of the giblets from our 25 broilers, so I got a bit lazy. I like your idea of rendering the fat for use in sausage especially!