Where does fried chicken come from?

If anything about this post sounds like it was written by a person who didn't grow up around chickens, it's because it was. At least my mom knew how to cut up a whole chicken that she bought at the store, I did not even know how to do that most of my adult life.

My kitchen and farm skills have improved over recent years, though. I have come to appreciate very much growing or raising your own food, and these days I participate in raising chickens of our own and butchering them when it's time. It is time again for the butchering, and my mother-in-law, Helen, and I started yesterday.

This is how the yearly process goes: Troy, his mom, and his brother James pick out chickens that they want to order from a catalog in the spring and the baby chicks are delivered in a box to a local post office for us to pick up. We keep them in a stock tank up at Troy's shop with lights on them to keep them warm. We feed and water them there for a while, until they are big enough to keep in a pen at the farm, it only takes a couple weeks.

The kind of chicken that we raise to butcher are called Cornish Crosses and they grow big quickly. These we ordered in April, and it is June now, so they were ready in two months' time.

They eat and drink a lot, they are just little growth machines. And they are cute, Alina takes pictures of them and wants to name them when we go to feed them and refresh their water. But once they stop looking like fluffy little chicks and they are taken to the farm with all the other chickens, names are forgotten and feeding and watering them is just an evening chore.

Now, I don't think anything that I am posting is gross, though I know there are varying levels of squeamishness in people. I have heard people say that simply handling raw meat from the package from the grocery store makes them a little queazy, and if that is the case, then this process is too much for you. I have also heard people say that they prefer to have no knowledge of how the meat gets to their plate, which I just don't relate to.

I want to be actively involved in how the meat I eat is raised. Is that weird?

I will name this one "Fluffy"

Helen says that her mom would go out and butcher and process 15 chickens in a day, all by herself. She remembers having a friend over one time and her mom asking them what they would like for lunch. When they answered "Fried Chicken", she went out, killed a chicken, cleaned it, and fried it up for them.

Helen and I decided six chickens is enough in a morning, so we did six yesterday morning and six more this morning. We will need to get together three more mornings to finish up. Troy is usually involved in this process, and he is extremely efficient in catching the chickens, killing them, and cutting them up. But he is working during the day, and right now in some stage of the haying process, along with other farm duties. Helen has been butchering chickens for years. She tells me she taught herself. As efficient and skilled as her mom was with the task, she never taught Helen how to do it.

The picture above is of Helen fetching chickens from the pen. She caught three of them to kill. She just grabs them by the feet, she's very quick for a woman her age.  I didn't take pictures of her killing them, in fact I don't even watch that part. But she and Troy do it the old fashioned way. They use a long metal bar, lay the chicken down on the ground, face down, place the bar down over the back of the chicken's neck, hold the bar down and pull the chicken's body up. It takes a second. Yes, the bodies flop around, it's part of it.

We have a pot of scalding water ready to dip the chickens in to help make the feathers easy to pick. They are actually very easy to pick, the feathers pull right out. It doesn't take long to have them ready to clean and cut up. Helen likes to do the rest inside at the kitchen sink to avoid having to deal with flies outside. Troy and I usually do the whole thing outside with big pots of water for cleaning.

54 piece bucket of chicken!

This is what they look like after we pick the feathers and cut off the feet. The dogs get the feet, we don't make chicken feet stew with them.

Me eating chicken feet stew in Peru.

Then we clean them off a little better in the process of cutting them up. Here is one ready to be gutted and cut into pieces. I got to practice today with the first part, as Helen does it, cutting off the wings, and the legs and thighs. Then there is the process of cutting the body cavity open at the ribs to gut the chicken, which I will need to practice in these next three mornings that we meet. Everything (gut wise) is intact in there, really, it's just a lot of pulling and tearing to get it all out. We save the heart, the livers and gizzards. Though I personally think the gizzards are pretty gross to deal with and also, the texture is like rubber to eat. If I had it my way it would just go in the bucket with the guts. The neck too. But Helen likes to keep it for stewing.

We cut the breast in two pieces, the top part Helen calls the "Pully Bone" the rest of us call it the "Wish Bone". (but of course you have to pull it to make the wish) And the back is cut as well. 

Then I put each chicken at a time in a ziplock freezer baggie and they go in the freezer, except for the one I take home immediately and marinate in sour milk to fry.

I never used to be confident enough to fry chicken at home. But last summer I decided to teach myself how to fry the perfect fried chicken and I did with the help of the internet. This is the link to the recipe. I follow it to the letter. I hope you try it and enjoy!

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/8805/crispy-fried-chicken/?internalSource=hub%20recipe&referringContentType=search%20results&clickId=cardslot%204