Chickens roaming the back yard in their chicken tractor is quite the fashionable thing for many a suburban garden these days. We all know how the chickens eat insects and provide us with lovely chicken poo for our gardens.
However, few people stop to think about other uses for these chickens - chicken meat. Poultry. Sunday dinner. It is the one way to really know that your chicken is organic!
As I child I was quite familiar with my Dad plucking the chicken that was to be our dinner the next day as my parents kept a chicken coop for most of my childhood. We soon learned not to get too attached to the fluffy little chickens that arrived on a regular basis. Lesson number one : Don’t play with your dinner!
These memories all came flooding back today as I was browsing through our bookshelves and came across a little book titled, Back in the Day by Michael Powell as he devotes two pages to the procedure of plucking a chicken.
Powell starts with a warning that plucking a chicken is “messy and smelly”, and I must confess that I can still smell the chicken and feather aroma after my father had dipped them in hot water. A necessity if one wants to raise chickens for the table
Procedure for Plucking a Chicken
1. After killing the chicken, hold it upside down by the feet and submerge it in a container of very hot water for between five and ten seconds, making sure that you soak all the feathers thoroughly (any longer and the bird will begin to cook), This loosens the feathers so that they can be plucked more easily.
2. Grab handfuls of feathers and pull to remove. The flight feathers on the wings and the tail feathers are the most difficult to remove, so begin with these and then move on to the rest of the bird.
3. Some birds are easy to pluck and can be stripped back within minutes; others may have many pinfeathers and take longer.
4. An old bird needs to dipped longer than a young bird. When plucking a young bird be careful not to rip its skin, which is more tender than in older birds.
5. Killing birds before the cold weather sets in is recommended as they will have less pinfeathers.
6. Wearing textured rubber gloves will give you more friction with which to grab the feathers.
7. Singe off the most difficult pinfeathers by passing the bird over an open fire.
Powell suggests skinning the bird taking off skin and feathers at the same time as an alternative, but this can lead to a dry chicken when cooking.
Powell provides no recommendations as to how to “wield the axe” to arrive at the dead bird, nor does he provide further instruction on gutting and preparing the bird for cooking.
Some things are best left to the imagination, I think! I buy my organic chicken from the butcher!
Back in the Day: 101 things everyone used to know how to do by Michael Powell, pp54,55.
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