After Mark killed our Plymouth Rocks, I set to work dressing the birds.  We kill so few chickens per year that we pluck by hand rather than springing for a Whiz-bang Chicken Plucker, and our unskilled fingers definitely spend more time removing feathers than on any other part of the dressing process.

I've read that a lot of small-scale chicken-keepers save time by skinning their birds rather than plucking but I usually like to keep the skin on so we can roast our birds to perfection.  Since our Plymouth Rocks were slated to be ground into sausage, though, I figured this was a good chance to try my hand at skinning.  Unfortunately, my first, unskilled attempt took as long as plucking the bird.  Oops.

I've included a drawing from this very useful article in hopes your first skinning operation will go more smoothly than mine did.  But don't fall into the trap of skinning all of your chickens --- honor your birds by eating as much of their body as you can.

Nearly every chicken slaughtering and butchering tutorial I've run across ends when the guts leave the bird.  Our own chicken butchering video is guilty of this omission because we simply didn't know any better.  Although our grandparents probably knew exactly what to do when that bird reached their kitchen, I for one have spent years figuring out the best way to cook a chicken.  Here are a few tips I've compiled over the last few years of cooking my own chickens.

Wait for rigor mortis to relax before cooking your bird.  You've probably heard that good beef is aged for several days before eating, but did you know that you should age chicken meat as well?  The easiest method is to put the whole chicken in your fridge for a couple of days (after it has been plucked, deheaded, and eviscerated, of course.)  Many people who complain that their homegrown chickens are tough probably skipped this step.

Leave the skin on.  Some backyard chicken keepers like to save time by skinning the chicken rather than plucking the feathers.  However, they're missing out on real chicken flavor.  The tastiest chicken is roasted with the skin on, allowing the fat from the skin to infuse the meat.

Old chickens are best turned into sausage.  So, you want to retire that hen who has stopped laying or the rooster who picks on your biddies --- can you eat them?  The meat of an old chicken will be extremely stringy even if you stew the bird for a long time, but the flavor is phenomenal if you instead grind the meat and turn it into potstickers or sausage.  A meat grinder is perfect for the job, but I've had good luck throwing the meat into a food processor and fishing out the white tendons.

Don't throw away the bones.  If you go to the trouble of raising your own chickens, you probably realize that the entirety of the bird is precious.  Rather than throwing away the bones after you've roasted a chicken, why not turn the carcass into stock?  Homemade chicken stock is much tastier than storebought, and is quite good for you (full of calcium from the bones.)  I used to make complicated stock, but my current method involves throwing the carcass, neck, and giblets into a big pot of water and boiling for a couple of hours.  Toss this simple stock into a vegetarian dish and trick carnivores into thinking they ate meat.

Still don't throw away the bones.  Once you strain out the chicken stock, you'll be left with a good bit of meat and bones.  It's not safe to feed cooked poultry bones to your dog, and if your cat is as spoiled as mine, he probably won't eat it.  However, you can put the carcass back in the chicken pasture and give your flock a boost.  Factory farmers have given this method a bad reputation, but if you know that the bird you ate was healthy (and why else would you have eaten it?), it's perfectly safe to feed the remains to the other chickens.  Chickens are not vegetarians, and their health will improve markedly when given a bit of animal protein from time to time.

We end our chicken food cycle there, allowing anything that's left to enrich our compost pile, but we've considered grinding the bones into bone meal to perk up our laying flock.  Has anyone had experience with grinding bones?  What type of equipment did you use?

Ranch Alacrity hosted a humane poultry butchering seminar in April for a group of young chefs-to-be.  "It really is a lost art, as is almost all butchering," said Titus Blackwood, who demonstrated de-feathering and dressing out.  "There is a resurgence of young chefs learning the art," she added, before explaining that humane butchering is ethical and results in tastier meat.

Titus was joined by Kristin Mahony and Jared Ligouri, who helped teach the seminar for Chef Rick Kangas' poultry class at Colorado Mountain College - Edwards.  Titus described the process of "ethically dispatching" the poultry as follows:

The young chefs took to the process quickly, showing great respect for the animals and a good work ethic.  One former vegetarian commented that he would have found the butchering process appropriate even before he began eating meat again.  Titus noted, "It was very clear to him that our birds had a wonderful healthy life and a humane death.  He still opted out of the dispatch, but he was a meticulous butcher."

"The students thanked me for bringing them out," wrote Chef Kangas, and went on to add that the seminar "will be an experience they will have all their lives and all their cooking careers.  If they weren't before, they are now part of the [Slow Food & Locavore] "movement" for sure!"

If you're within driving distance of Vail, Colorado, or are in the Eagle Valley and would like to learn how to get started in poultry-keeping and/or how to dispatch your birds humanely, please contact Titus Blackwood: 970-926-0345 or titus@llwa.org.

Photo credit goes to Titus Blackwood.