We are proponents of using the whole animal when the decision is made to slaughter. Like many folks this wasn’t something we were exactly used to to start with. Slaughtering our own chickens last year defintely encouraged us to start doing a little more research in to the uses of “offal” (or giblets in the case of chickens). This will be at least a two part post with the first being mine…
Chicken stock:
Necks and feet make particularly unctuous chicken stock when combined with your left over cooked carcasses or raw backbones from parting out a whole chicken. (Heads can also be used in stock making.)
The best trick I’ve learned with regards to homemade stock is to start a freezer bag for vegetable ends and pieces and add scraps to the bag as you make other meals. Your vegetable bag can contain: “butts” of celery, carrots, and onions, onion/leek/shallot skins, herb stems, garlic pieces, and/or any other vegetable or herb pieces that you would enjoy flavoring your stock. It’s a great way to use those vegetables that aren’t appealing enough to go on the plate but are far from spoiled. I also start freezer bags for chicken carcasses and pieces, as well as separate bags for fish/seafood and beef. (When buying whole seafood make sure to ask for the heads, backbones, and tails when having them filleted. There is loads of flavor in there still.)
When you acquire enough material, normally a gallon freezer bag is a good amount, of vegetables and/or meat you are ready to make stock.
Add to a large stock pot, necks, feet, carcasses (broken up as best possible) along with a few carrots, onions, and celery OR your vegetable scraps bag (frozen is fine) along with 5-15 peppercorns, 1 or 2 bay leaves, and small amount of salt. Add enough water to cover the material by several inches. If you prefer a lighter stock, add more water. If you want a denser stock I recommend reducing it further, see the next part about “demi-glace”, rather than using too little water. Bring to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer. Simmer uncovered, on the stove top or wood stove for as many hours as you have patience for, or a minimum of 1 hour. Strain and discard the solids. You will need to either skim the fat from the stock for immediate use or cool the stock and remove the solidified fat (easier). We freeze our stock in vacuum sealed bags for later use. Be aware that your homemade stock will likely cool to a gelatinous consistency. This is due to the actual gelatin in the carcasses and feet in particular. It will add a body and depth to your stock that you’ll never get out of canned broth or bouillon cubes. We prefer to under salt our stock so we do not risk it becoming too salty as it reduces and instead salt the stock in its final application.
A note on chicken feet: chicken feet have to be “declawed” and the skin removed before cooking. You can normally tell if this has been done if the feet are a pale, creamy color instead of a yellow or grey/brown color. Scalding the feet will allow the skin to be peeled off pretty easily. The claws have an exterior claw kind of like a cap that can be removed by pulling the wrong direction on the claw. This also helps insure that the feet are clean and no dirt remains.
Chicken “Demi-glace”:
To maximize storage space and for more versatility, we simmer our stock for a couple hours, strain and discard the solids as before, and then return the stock to a simmer on the stove top to reduce further to create a “demi-glace”. Once reduced to our liking, we cool to remove the solidified fat, reheat to liquefy, and pour the demi-glace into silicon ice cube trays (the solid plastic ones are hard to get the sauce back out of once frozen). We freeze the trays, and once frozen, remove the cubes to a zip top freezer bag. The demi-glace can be “rehydrated” to a stock by adding water, or can make a wonderful quick sauce or rich gravy as needed. The cubes make it very easy to grab just a little bit at a time.
We are going to raise a limited quantity of pasture-raised, natural, meat birds for on farm sales this year. In order to do so we’d like to approximate interest through tentative pre-orders. There are a lot of unknowns at this point, including final weights, ratio of “Fryers” to “Roasters”, etc.
Our meat birds are treated the same as our laying hens. They will spend a maximum of 4 weeks in a brooding environment (heated and protected) and then spend their remaining time ranging and receiving supplemental growing feed. They are not medicated or treated with antibiotics.
These are not your store bought factory chicken. We’ve raised that breed and we have pledged never to do it again (You can read our experience starting here). This year we are going with the Jumbo Cornish-X’s little brother the Cornish Roaster. They take longer to mature and are in between a standard breed and the Jumbo in size and growth.
Once you’ve read all the details, there is information for pre-ordering at the bottom of this post.
We are targeting slaughter/pick-up dates of:
“Fryers”
- Saturday and Sunday, April 17h and 18th
- Saturday and Sunday, April 24th and 25th
“Roasters”
- Saturday and Sunday, May 8th and 9th
- Saturday and Sunday, May 15th and 16th
- Saturday and Sunday, May 22nd and 23rd
“Fryers” – Fryers will weigh an estimated 3-4lbs, but size is not guaranteed. They are priced per lb. to account for variances. Fryers will reach slaughtering weights in approximately 8 weeks. Fryer chickens should be more suitable for quicker cooking applications (i.e. pan frying).
“Roasters” –Roasters will weigh an estimated 7-9lbs, but size is not guaranteed. They are priced per lb. to account for variances. Roasters will reach slaughtering weights in approximately 12 weeks. Roaster chickens are more suitable for longer cooking applications (i.e. oven roasting).
Details
Bird(s) will be picked up on farm on designated slaughter day and time. Your bird(s) will be humanely slaughtered by hand, plucked, and eviscerated. They will be ready to go immediately in to your freezer or oven. They will only be available whole (no parts). Final bird weights will vary and are determined after processing. If you are interested in all or part of the offal/giblets* from your bird please let us know.
Price $4.25 per lb. (dressed weight).
* Offal/giblets includes: head, neck, feet, heart, liver, and gizzard. Please understand that eviscerating poultry is a delicate task and we do our best to ensure that the offal is as complete as possible.
If you are interested in purchasing a LIVE bird ready for slaughter, please let us know. Price $2.50 per lb. (live weight).
Pick-up Dates/Times: Processing dates and times are predetermined, but will be finalized a few weeks prior to slaughter. We will contact you in the few weeks prior to each slaughter to arrange a pick-up date/time. Tentative pre-orders will be contacted first come, first served.
Regulations require that the birds are picked up within 4 hours of slaughter, or cooling/refrigeration standards apply. We kindly ask that you be on-time for your pick-up date and time to ensure that we remain in compliance. Changes to dates/times must be made 24 hours in advance.
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If you are interested in pre-ordering please send email to farmers@miscfarm.com with the following information. We will contact you a few weeks prior to slaughter dates to confirm your interest and pick-up dates/times.
How many FRYERS are you interested in (# of birds)?
How many ROASTERS are you interested in (# of birds)?
How many of EITHER are you interested in (lbs. or # of birds)? [Please specify if lbs. or # of birds]
Contact information
Name:
Phone:
Email:
We celebrated the return of the sun this year with a dinner among friends and family and a resolution for the coming year. Our resolution is to not purchase any meat of unknown origin/treatment (and by that I really mean origin/treatment that we agree with). The big thing we are currently challenged by is pork. We don’t have any friends raising pigs that we are aware of and haven’t ventured in to that yet ourselves. It wouldn’t be quite so bad but our daughters managed to eat through the last three packages of bacon while they were here so we are out. It’s nearly impossible to find sustainably raised bacon because the demand far outstrips the supply and is completely out of balance with the idea of utilizing the whole pig. People just consume far more bacon than they do other pork products. We know of at least one farm locally that sells pork belly during the market season and year-round from the farm. Since it’s not cured or smoked people don’t seem to know what to do with it so it’s generally available. So we will probably embark on trying to make our own bacon in the near future to fill the gap and/or look to purchase a half pig this year.
We decided to set a “January resolution” as well. Partly out of necessity. We had decided we would wait until after the holidays and try to do some overhauls on our spending so we could try to save some money to reinvest in to the property. Couple that with the travel expenses, septic repairs, and truck repairs in the last 6 weeks or so and we could really do with a good dose of belt-tightening. So for January we have resolved not to buy any food or go out to eat. Realistically it’s not zero, but as little as possible (for example, we need flour so we will buy that or buy wheat berries to mill our own). Through the winter we often “slack” and get a weekly delivery of organic produce to fill in some of the gaps (it’s not all local, sadly). We are keeping the weekly produce delivery, but it’s a relatively low cost and good value. It also has the effect of keeping us out of veggie ruts and forcing us to try new things. We figure that the challenge should have positive effects on both our wallet and our waistlines. We also could use a little eating down on the freezer/pantry. I tend to buy stuff on deals and stockpile like the end of the world is coming. We want to make room in the freezer for a nice local spring lamb or two and that pig I mentioned. It’s also hard to justify growing/canning more food when we still have plenty from the previous year (or two).
I’ve been plotting and planning for this year’s back yard garden already. I’m using growveg.com which looks very promising. We are also discussing building raised beds for the front yard garden instead of using all of the containers. They work relatively well but look like a cluttered mess. I’ve resolved to only buy seeds that are really needed this year. The last two years I’ve gone browsing through the seed catalogs in the dead of winter and ended up with all kinds of things I don’t need (they are sneaky that way, sending the catalogs when you are yearning for just about anything green and growing). So far eggplants and celery are the only thing on my list that I need to buy. To help avoid the over purchasing I’m also going to pick them up at the local garden store instead of mail order so I can’t justify making the shipping costs worth it as a reason to buy more seed.
The new flock of baby chicks is just about a month old now and doing great. They are whizzing around the brooder box still and we had to upgrade their feeder and water fount to larger sizes to keep them from emptying them while we were at work. We were just discussing this morning where they are going to range and the housing situation. We may free range them even though I had originally decided not to, just because we really need to do more clearing before we have space to fence and the tractor has been out of commission for several months (seems like a trend around here).
So far this winter has been really good for our current laying flock. Of the original 13 purchased we have all but 1, but we still have 1 from last year’s flock. It seems like we’ve typically lost more than that. We started with 12 or 13 last year and by the time they were laying we only had 8 hens and 1 rooster. We currently have 11 hens and 1 rooster. Egg sales have been going very well and we have far more demand than supply most of the time. It always disappoints me to tell someone I can’t sell them eggs because I think they are just the most wonderful things and everyone that wants them should get an opportunity. So I look forward to the new flock starting to lay and giving me more inventory to work with.
We are still planning on getting another flock this spring and I’m hoping to include a few laying and/or meat ducks in the order as well as some chickens for meat again. We won’t be doing the cornish-x again so I haven’t quite decided on how I want to approach things. I can either get a straight run of the hens we want and hope the roo to hen ratio isn’t too far off, or we can order sexed roos and hens individually. I think it costs about the same either way. I’m also eliciting assistance from our oldest daughter (10 later this January) in helping to select some of the laying hens. I’m excited to see what she chooses. At some point we need to invest in an incubator and just hatch our own chicks. We’ll get there eventually.
I’m practically counting the days until mid-February when I can start my seeds!
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