A friend rang us up the other day, asking if we wanted their young rooster for the pot. He had just started crowing, and was no longer welcome in their yard.
Instead of taking it, I offered to show him how to kill and process it himself. I had a young rooster I wanted to do as well, so we may as well do them together. He came over with his wife and daughter yesterday, we had a great BBQ lunch, and then got to work.
I’ve posted before about my process for killing and cleaning chickens. There are links there to excellent web sites and resources that contain everything you need to know.
Because both of the roosters were pretty young, they’d make good roasting birds. So we plucked them instead of skinning them like I usually do. Only problem is, I don’t have a pot large enough to scald chickens in – so we had to dry-pluck. It’s not hard, but it does take a lot longer than scalding.
Once again, the chicken processing station proved a winner. The two of us had plenty of space to work side-by-side.
It’ll be roast chicken for dinner tonight!
Comments
2 responses to “Processing Roosters”
Great to see someone else who’s not scared to kill a rooster for food 🙂 If you don’t have a pot big enough to dunk the chicken in, you can boil a jug or pot and pour the hot water over the chicken instead, its not as good, but does get a feathers looser than if you dry pluck.
@farmer_liz: I’ve no problem killing my own roosters when they taste this good! The next time I did a chicken, I poured hot water into a large heavy-duty plastic bucket for scalding, and the plucking went so much faster. I’ve no idea why I didn’t think of that before! I guess I was just looking for something I could put on the stove, and never considered heating the water in a pot and transferring it to a dunking tank. Duh!