Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [119]
The pigs are getting big. Jed told me I’d know they were ready to butcher when they wouldn’t fit between my legs at a straddle, but (A) Jed’s about five-foot-five—if he followed his own advice he’d never butcher a pig bigger than a schnauzer, and (B) you gotta be kidding. Tom, the old-timer in the valley, says four pounds of grain equals one pound of gain, but I haven’t been keeping track, plus there’s all the goat milk and expired cinnamon rolls. He also says any pig over 250 pounds is starting to run more to fat than meat. My brother-in-law Mark says I should just raise them as big as I can get them. As he put it, “I figure every additional inch is two more pork chops.”
I ask around, and someone says there is a fellow who will come out to the farm and do the butchering. His name is Muzzy. I give him a call, ask if he’ll come and eyeball the pigs, let me know if they’re getting close.
My sister Kathleen and brother-in-law Mark are butchering their chickens, and I’ve gone to lend a hand. Mark once helped me resurrect my beloved old International pickup, so I owe him pretty much forever, and furthermore, I’m treating this as a refresher course in case we decide to butcher our own chickens this year. I haven’t butchered chickens since I helped my brother John about six years ago. Mark and I wade into the chickens and each grab a bird. The things are huge and solid—I feel like I’m cradling a feathered bowling ball. Mark has rolled up four tin funnels and nailed them to a horizontal plank attached to the back of his chicken tractor. We stick the birds headfirst down the funnels. When all four funnels are occupied, Mark grabs a butcher knife, fishes out the head of the first chicken, extends the neck and with one quick motion, severs the head, and moves to the next bird. The funnels keep the birds from flapping all over creation (while the idea of a chicken running around with its head cut off tends to be used in a humorous sense, the reality is much more unnerving, and more than one farm kid recalls the freakout of zigzagging across the yard two steps ahead of a spasming two-legged gore-geyser that seems to be matching zig for zag) while also allowing the blood to drain to the ground.
When the blood is down to a slow drip and the legs stop kicking, I grab two birds by their feet, pull them from the funnel, and carry them over to where my father is heating a large pan of water over a propane burner for the purpose of scalding the birds, which loosens their feathers for plucking. The scalding is tricky—immerse the bird too long or at too high a temperature, and you begin to cook the skin and it will tear when you pluck; too briefly or at too low a temperature and the feathers fail to loosen, and plucking becomes even more of a chore. As to the perfect temperature for scalding, experts agree: the experts disagree. Dad finds it helps if you plunge the bird up and down slowly, which seems to increase the penetration of the hot water.
Next Dad gives the bird a turn on the automatic plucker. My brother John built the plucker himself and its main feature is a rotating drum bristling with rubber fingers. Dad lays the chicken on the drum and turns it this way and that. The fingers snag the feathers and sends them flying into a pile. As the day progresses they collect on the lawn like a soggy pink-tinted snowbank. The plucker gets about 90 percent of the feathers (lately we have been eyeballing an improved model), but the rest require manual labor. At eye level between two trees, Mark has rigged a line threaded with a series of blunt hooks. The hooks are sized so that the shin of the chicken will easily fit but the foot catches. Most of the remaining feathers can be plucked by hand, although we do break out the pliers now and then. At the very end we use a handheld propane torch to singe the pinfeathers, which blacken, curl, and burn away to nothing. If you hold the flame in one place