Tips for Butchering a Chicken

I butchered my first chicken yesterday, and I would like to share a couple of things I learned.

Reader Contribution by Erin C
Published on March 28, 2017
article image
by AdobeStock/Vladimir

A few months ago, I wrote a blog about how I had never cut up a whole chicken. When I was in college and I wanted to cook chicken, I bought boneless, skinless chicken breast. I couldn’t de-bone something to save my life. My husband took our whole chickens we had butchered — and that he had plucked and skinned and made into a pretty little package for me — to learn how to cut up a chicken himself.

Chicken School

Yesterday I went to “whole chicken cutting-up grad school;” I helped my hubby butcher. We had three roosters all just coming into their breeding, crowing, beating-up-hens-and-each-other phase, and some of the girls were starting to look a little ragged. Actually, a lot ragged. One of them even has a gash the size of a nickel on her back that is deep enough to see muscle and fat. So we decided it was time for two of the guys to go to freezer camp. Because we want it to be as humane as possible, my husband shoots them in the head with a shotgun. There’s no question that they are dead. Two of the roosters were the same age and about the same build. The third was a few weeks younger and was caught up in heft. All three are chicks we hatched from our hens.

I have been present when my husband butchered in the past, and I helped my parents years and years ago with plucking. But my homesteading confession is that I haven’t ever done all of the butchery on my own. So I told my husband yesterday that I wanted to learn how. It seems important to be as connected to the whole process as possible. And after my very first whole butchering experience, I have some tips and pointers for anyone trying to learn how.

The (Unexpected) Rules

Rule #1 of Butchering: Keep your mouth closed. This isn’t some rule about how the person showing you how is your teacher and you just silently do as they say. No, this is a rule aimed at your well-being. See, I didn’t know this rule when I started, so as I was plucking some abdominal feathers to get started and yammering away at my husband about something pretty inconsequential, the wind kicked up and I ended up with feathers in my mouth. That about derailed the whole thing for me. I’m not squeamish; my job makes being grossed-out impossible. So it wasn’t that I was about to vomit, I just couldn’t do anything about it. My hands had feathers and blood on them, so I was stuck with feathers in my mouth — at least for a couple of minutes while I rinsed my hands, trying the whole time to spit them out. So yeah, maybe save a story about work for another time and keep your mouth shut.

Online Store Logo
Need Help? Call 1-866-803-7096