How To Process A Chicken From Start To Finish

Want to learn how to process a chicken from start to finish? Find out which chicken butchering supplies you need to get started and benefit from the meat of your own chickens.

Reader Contribution by Mary Lou Shaw
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by AdobeStock/Kishyru

Want to learn how to process a chicken from start to finish? Find out which chicken butchering supplies you need to get started and benefit from the meat of your own chickens.

Chickens in the backyard can become meat on the table, but only if we can get them from the backyard into the cooking pot. This can challenge our skills as well as emotions, so let’s discuss the basics on how to get the job done.

In the years past, my husband and I have only processed three to four chickens at a time: killed them with a hatchet, hung them from a clothes line, scalded and then hand-plucked each bird. Because we lacked skills and even proper knives, the job was unpleasant and the results not picture-pretty. We wanted to get 16 chickens into the freezer this fall, and so we improved the process

Processing Chickens at Home with Killing Cones

First, we transitioned from the hatchet to five “killing cones” made out of sheet metal, using a pattern out of the “Anyone Can Build a Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker” manual by Herrick Kimball. I feel the cones allowed the birds to remain calmer and eliminated the risk of a misdirected hatchet stroke. Each cone was positioned over a drywall bucket so the blood could later be transferred to the compost pile.

  • Updated on Mar 22, 2023
  • Originally Published on Aug 22, 2020
Tagged with: Butchering, chickens, Mary Lou Shaw, pastured meat, raising livestock, Reader Contributions
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