Chicken Guts

Yesterday, I spent about 6 hours pulling warm guts from chickens. All I needed was a strong stomach and a sharp knife. I volunteered to help process the late June chicken harvest for Pete and Jen's Backyard Birds, and joined about a dozen other like-minded folks working under the watchful eye of Pete and Jen.

It was kinda fun.

The term 'process' is really a euphemism for several steps. When the free-range/pastured chickens that Pete and Jen raise are ready for harvest, they're rustled into crates for an overnight fast. They're then placed, one at a time, head-down into a large funnel-shaped cone with a small opening at the bottom. Each inverted chicken is then stunned with an electric jolt, followed by a large slit to the throat.

Here's the failed former half-term Governor of Alaska to show you what I'm taking about.

There are six funnels in the setup we used, kind of like a barbershop with six chair (no waiting!).

It takes several minutes for the chicken's blood to be completely drained, at which point up to three chickens are placed in a large rectangular vat of scalding hot water. A rotating paddle alternately submerses the chickens under the scalding water, then lifts them above it.

Another person who operates a large mechanical plucker decides when the chickens have been adequately scalded, removes them from the scalder, and drops them into what looks like the inner workings of a washing machine lined with short, stubby rubber fingers. When this device is activated, it tosses the limp dead chickens all around, which somehow also removes pretty much all of their feathers.

He turns the machine off after a few minutes on the 'heavy dirt' cycle, then uses a pair of large specialty shears to remove the feet and heads. The feet go into one bucket - they're subsequently further cleaned and processed to be sold separately. I've been told that they make excellent stock (lots of collagen yields a rich broth).

I don't know what happens to the heads. I don't want to know. Hot dogs?

The headless, feetless, bloodless, featherless, and lifeless chickens are now plopped into a tub of cool water, which is also where me and my fellow volunteer eviscerators come in.

Eviscerating a chicken is a great way to learn about its anatomy. Jen graciously demonstrated the following evisceration technique, which I followed meticulously:

• Grab a wet chicken from the cooling tub, and lay it breast side down on the impeccably clean stainless steel work surface, with the long neck pointing towards you and slightly to the right (for right-handed eviscerators). Using the tip of an unforgivingly sharp knife, cut through the skin of the chicken's surprisingly long neck. Try to do this in a single smooth cut, and don't cut any deeper than the skin. Hold the chicken's body steady with your left hand.
  
• Put the knife down in a safe place for a moment, sit the chicken upright, then use your right hand to grip the end of the cut neck skin flap and pull it down, as through removing a glove or stripping the skin off a chicken neck. It should come easily with a single steady pull, so that you now looking at a bony naked neck sticking up from what you'd recognize as a whole chicken at the market.
• Lay the chicken down again, grab that knife, and cut through the skinless neck. Don't whack at it wildly - that's how to get hurt. Instead, make a deep cut while applying firm and steady pressure to get through the small bones. It may help to bend the neck a bit. Toss the chicken neck into the iced bucket marked 'Necks.'
• Now look for two flesh-colored tubes attached to the loose flap of neck skin, and tug them away from the skin. One of the tubes broadens out and forms the crop at the bottom of the chicken's right side of the neck skin (the left side as it faces you), also firmly attached to the skin. It should be empty, because the chicken hasn't eaten in a while. Work this away from the skin entirely, too. This is an important step, because you'll soon be pulling out the entire alimentary canal from the other end. If you don't separate things up here, you'll have a hell of a time later.
  
• Now line up the chicken on its back, with the feet toward you and slightly to the right. Get a good pinch of stomach skin in the unprotected area below the breast. Cut into the skin below where you are pinching, and across the chicken's belly. Don't cut too deeply, to avoid nicking any of the internal organs.
• With the chicken still on its back, legs towards you, look for the butt hole, also called the vent. It looks sorta like this: *
• Work a few fingers of your left hand through the cut you just made, down into the chicken's insides. The the goal now is to find and pinch off the section of large intestine where it ends at the vent, using the ends of you index and middle (or middle and ring) fingers. It's important to find and hold this section of the intestines to avoid cutting into it.
  
• Once you've found it, use your knife to cut from the earlier crosswise incision downwards, staying to the right of the vent. When you've reached that point, curve the cut around the vent (kind of like completing the letter 'J'). You're almost home.
• Now take the knife, keeping hold of the large intestine/vent with the fingers of your left hand, and turn the 'J' into a 'U.' I always worked down from the other side of the cross cut.
• If everything worked out as it was supposed to, your left hand is now holding the last section of the large intestine with an attached butt hole surrounded by some skin. You can let go of it.
  
• Now reach into the chicken's abdomen as far as you can, and grab the whole works. Pull it out onto the table to admire God's handiwork, which you have knowingly undone.
• The gizzard is a big, tough, ugly baseball-sized thing. Cut it away from the intestines, and toss it in the iced bucket labeled, 'Gizzards.' Someone else will deal with this in greater detail, along with all of those little feet from before.
• Look around in the pile of guts to find the heart. If you don't see it, reach into the chicken and feel around again. When you find it, toss it into the bucket marked, 'Hearts.'
• Now look for the liver - again, an obvious organ for anyone who's ever cooked a turkey or chicken, or who's explored the little wax paper bag found in most whole chickens at the market. The difference here is that the small gall bladder/bile sac is still attached to this one, and you've got to ease it off gently. Be careful not to puncture or spill the bile - it's fluorescent green and stains everything it comes into contact with. I didn't nick or spill a single one, but the guy next to me did couple of times. You could easily make a bunch of Grateful Dead t-shirts with the stuff.
• The rest of the guts go into the gut bucket, which McDonald's uses for its tasty Chicken McNuggets (kidding!).
  
• We're almost done. The only step left is to reach into the chicken one last time to scrape out the lungs, which adhere to shallow depressions on either side of the backbone. They're very spongy, so forget about getting them out intact. Just scrape with your finger tips. Yes, just like that.
• Now do it one more time.
• Finally, grab a hose and rinse the chicken well, inside and out. Bring it over to another big covered tub filled with ice and water, where it will cool off some more.
• Repeat.

There were 320 chickens, and ten of us eviscerating. I probably managed to average about four chickens per hour, but nobody kept track of anything except the total number of chickens that still needed to be gutted.

We kept up a friendly banter for the first couple of hours, mixing philosophical comments about what we were doing with sick jokes and encouragement. But at some point, the talk quieted and we just kept at it until the last chicken was put into the final ice bath.

Then it was time for lunch. I ate heartily (turkey club roll-up with avacado slices), then made my way home for a long, hot shower and a nap. I was exhausted. Pete and Jen had enough work left to keep them busy for the rest of the day, and probably into the evening.

I didn't take any pictures, and I'm sure you can figure out why. Here's a nice short video of a pretty horse I saw there instead: