The amazing chicken plucker

 What a week! The deck was finished on Friday. We butchered chickens Saturday. Our morning began by rounding up the meat chickens and the old Wyandotte hens. We had one two-year-old Americauna, Brownie, who should have been butchered, but Terry has bonded with her. We gave her a reprieve.

Death Row

You may recall that the chicken butchering last year was an exhausting marathon lasting something like 15 hours. When chicken pluckers went on sale at Farm and Fleet at the end of August, I bought one. Plucking is definitely the most time-consuming part of the process. The side of the box said, “Roaster ready in 15 seconds.”

Yeah, right, I thought. I was most skeptical of the plucker’s ability to get the feathers off the inside of the wings. Well, let me tell you, the chicken plucker was PLUCKING AMAZING! All that we hoped for and more. Here is the plucking station with the hot water bath on the left and the plucker on the right.

Thermostatically controlled water bath, left. Plucker on the right.

This is the inside of the plucker. 

The inside of the plucker

There is a hose at the top with holes at regular intervals to squirt water on the chicken in all directions. (The plucker can do two at a time, but I can’t scald at that rate.) The tub spins around while the dead, scalded chicken flails madly against the numerous rubber fingers. The feathers are washed to the bottom. There is a gap between the bottom plate and the side where the feathers fall. Three rubber fingers pointed in the opposite direction (you can see them at the bottom right) whisk the feathers into a chute that empties into a bucket. In theory, the bucket should have holes to let the water out, but we did not have proper drainage on the patio, so Terry dumped the 5-gallon bucket into a larger holey muck bucket between each chicken.

And by golly, those chickens came out clean as a whistle! It was AWESOME. 

These chickens are so plucked!

We dispatched, scalded, and plucked 17 chickens in two hours, and that includes a break of 20 or 30 minutes to warm up clean scalding water halfway through. Best $300 I ever spent, that plucker. Really, we should have done 18 chickens, 15 broilers plus 3 Wyandottes, but one of the hens got loose. The best we could do was get her back in the apple orchard. She is now named Henrietta Houdini.

I was busy again on Sunday making baked beans, potato salad, and deviled eggs for the Fourth of July.

Terry wanted to burn the brush he’d been accumulating all spring before a flood came and scattered it all over the field. In addition to all the branches that came down in various windstorms, we had the old stairs and leftover wood scraps from the deck.

The burn pile. Stairs, cut in two pieces, at right with scraps on top.

Monday was a little rainy, but a break at 2:30 allowed us to go back to the creek and torch the burn pile. Terry started it with gasoline. Boys will be boys.

The fire took off in a hurry. Pretty soon, the stairs started smoking.

Stairs, right, start to smoke.

And burst into flame without having direct contact with the fire.

Stairs start burning

Terry circled the fire with a pitchfork, throwing the sticks at the edge toward the middle.

Terry tends the fire

At 4:00, thunder started rumbling too close for comfort. We went back to the house to play a few rounds of Mexican train while the rain poured down. It stopped in time for Terry to fire up the grill and cook brats and hot dogs as well as our first zucchini, pablanos, and jalapenos from the garden. For dessert, we had chocolate cream pie. So good, if I say so myself.

Chocolate cream pie

Our guests did not stay long with more storms coming. It got bad during the night. My internet went down and stayed down until just this minute. I called my provider a couple of times and got automated messages about a tower being down. They thanked me for my patience. I don’t get much cell phone signal where I live either, so I had no email access at home from Tuesday through Friday. Another storm rolled through Tuesday. Between the two storms, we got nearly 4” of rain. It speaks to the extent of our drought that we did not flood. All that rain ran into the giant cracks in the ground. Nevertheless, we were glad the burn pile was gone!