Go pluck yourself!

Hello jstewart and welcome to myLot. Over my life time I have helped many a chicken get dressed for the freezer and the table. I started when I was about 13 years old and living with my grandparents. When we dressed chickens we would do 25 at a time. My grandfather would decapitate them when he was around, if he wasn't then grandma had the job. she would start with two buckets of water boiling on the stove. It did take a knack learning to get all the feather along with the pin feathers off the chickens. You soon learned how to brush the feather off quickly because if you allowed the chickens to get too cool then the feathers were harder to get off the bird. It was so good to just pull a chicken out of the freezer to cook. and they tasted so much better than any thing you can buy at the grocery store. They were nice and firm not mushy like you find today.

I've never killed or plucked a chicken maybe an occasional pin / pin feather from the one @ the grocery store. If you can find an organic free range farmer & if they'd do the butchering for you it maybe worth your wild to try it that way? I know sometimes at the farmers markets they sell them already butchered.

I've got my own chickens and don't think I could do it either. They have machines that can pluck for you, but they are in the thousands of dollars so cost prohibitive unless you have a commercial operation. I've heard you can just put the whole critter in scalding water and peel the skin off, feathers and all, but I would still think that would be quite messy. I haven't decided how I'll handle mine when they're no longer producing eggs.

lol!That brings back so many memories for me! How funny! Yeah, preparing one chicken is really hard work. However, on the farm you take a day and do all the chickens that are ready. That way you load the freezer up! You would want to buy like at least 4-5 chickens I would think. Then you get some help and it turns into an assembly line. Then when you are done you've got several packages of chicken to last quite a while!

I have witnessed how a chicken is killed and I felt horrible and very sorry for the chicken. That was years ago when dressed chickens weren't sold yet. So now, we do not anymore have to slit its neck and remove the feathers. We buy dressed chicken so it doesn't look so pathetic when you cook it.

Oooh, I don't think I could do that, catch a live chicken, kill it, thenk pluch it, cook it and then serve it on the table to eat! I just can't imagaine that at all. I would probably be more likely to start with the chicken and talk to it if I do manage to bring it home. On the other hand, although I love animals I still do eat meat, and I do feel guilty about it at times... my aunt cooked us pheasant or some sort of bird once, when we went to visit her, I watched as she brought the birds home, drown it in the bucket and then took it off to the kitchen, I didn't touch anything on that plate when it came to the table, and to this day I still don't any form of bird dish... I understand how you feel it's not a pleaanat experience to have to personally kill your own food and then go though all the feather business...imagine it as a job, it's not a pleasant one or for the faint hearted...there has been lots of debate about this for meat eaters - usually it from the vegetarians, they say you want to eat meat? Go catch it, and kill it yourself at the abbortoir and then bring it home...I really can't imagaine what it would be like if we were under a system where if yo wanted to go buy meat, you had to go to the farm and buy the live version of it. Actually, in many countries, they have this system where many of the meat products they buy have to be alive just before they buy it - they believe that this is the best way to get the freshest taste and flavour!