Chicken: from field to freezer

Dominiques, Australorps, Buff Orpingtons and Delawares

Last week, some of our beloved birds fulfilled their purpose in their life. 

The day started incredibly early, before dawn, rounding up chickens into cages ready for the journey to the farm where they would be processed.  We rounded up twenty-nine birds: nineteen Australorp roosters, nine older laying hens and one Australorp/Leghorn rooster.  The layers and the A/L rooster were my sister-in-law's.  We use a fantastic chap to process our birds, Benjamin Shaw of Garden of Spices in Greenwich, NY.  He and his family run a speedy and efficient poultry processing service.  It took less than two hours for the twenty-nine birds to come back to me neatly packaged and ready to take home. 

A short while ago, I processed three of our roosters myself and it took me approximately one hour per bird.  I am quite chuffed with my time but twenty-nine chickens would have taken me at least two days so for the small fee of $3 per bird, all I had to do was sit, enjoy the scenery and drink my coffee. 

Here I am, plucking one of the Dominique roosters earlier in Fall

Our chickens have been fed an organic, non-GMO diet since they arrived.  With the exception of my SIL's laying hens, the oldest birds were the Australorps at 26 weeks.  I opted not to take any of the Dominique's because they are all laying beautiful eggs and I had already processed the roosters that we did not need to keep.  The Buff Orpingtons and Delawares are 24 and 20 weeks, respectively, not quite big enough to process.  I will winter them and then take another group of chickens to Mr Shaw in the Spring. 

 

One of our processed birds

 

My SIL and I weighed the chickens when I got home and were pleased to find that their weights ranged from 3.3 to 4.6 lns.  We were very pleased indeed.  My family and I had our first roast chicken from the new batch on Friday evening for our Shabbat dinner.  He was an incredibly tasty bird and we felt incredibly blessed to be eating something that I've spent the last six months raising.  Taking a picture of the said roast would have been a fantastic idea, but we were all to eager to taste our feast so I'll have to take a picture next time I roast a bird. 







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