Best Methods for Quickly Plucking Chickens, Immediately after slaughter, the chicken must be plucked. It is important not to miss the moment, otherwise it will be much more difficult to remove feathers from a stiff carcass. When choosing how to pluck a chicken, many try several methods, ultimately settling on the most convenient one.
Plucking methods are divided into dry and hot. All the others are derivatives of them, including those that require the use of special devices, attachments, and devices. At home and on poultry farms, essentially the same principles of processing chickens after slaughter are used.
Dry method
Chicken at home is not only eggs and meat. In addition, it is a source of valuable down and feathers. After plucking chickens, they are used as fillers for pillows, featherbeds or blankets. In this case, dry processing is used. It is very labor-intensive and painstaking. However, as a result, the efficiency of chicken breeding increases.
To maintain the integrity of the skin, the following sequence is followed during dry plucking:
- Place the chicken on a flat surface.
- First of all, pluck all the flight feathers. They are pulled out carefully, in the direction of growth, without grabbing too much at once and without making any sudden movements.
- After the flight feathers, you need to pluck the small feathers from the chest, back, belly, and shoulder girdle. Here the order of actions is different – grab several pieces and pull against the growth. To prevent the feathers from flying around and interfering with the work, they can be periodically sprinkled with water.
- The plucked feathers are sorted and placed in different containers so that they can then be treated with detergents or washed.
- The stumps remaining after plucking are cut with a knife or scissors and burned. A regular gas stove or blowtorch will do for this.
- The chicken is washed thoroughly. It can only be gutted after this.
When dry processing, it is important to pluck the chicken while it is still warm. Without skill, this is difficult to do. Therefore, you can use scalding to begin with.
Hot method or scalding
The easiest way to pluck a chicken at home is by hot processing. Immediately before slaughter, you need to heat the water to boiling. Measure out the volume so that you can immerse the whole chicken. Usually, 7-8 liters of water or an incomplete bucket is enough for one carcass. While the chicken is being slaughtered, the water will have time to cool down to the required temperature, which is +80°C – +90°C.
After the blood has drained from the body, the chicken is completely immersed in hot water and kept there for about 40 seconds. If you have to process an older bird, it is recommended to keep it there longer.
Then, all the plucking stages described for dry processing are completely repeated.
With the help of devices
Knowing how to pluck a chicken correctly, many craftsmen try to make the painstaking processing easier with technical innovations. In addition to exclusive options that have not received widespread distribution, there are quite popular ones.
Almost all of them are made in the form of a plucking attachment. To use it, you will need a drill, hammer drill, or screwdriver. The attachment makes plucking much easier, especially if you need to process several chickens at once after slaughter.
As a rule, the plucking attachment looks like a cylinder with ribbed rubber or caoutchouc fingers evenly distributed over the surface. If you follow the instructions, the entire treatment will take no more than 5 minutes. At the same time, the integrity of the skin is preserved during plucking.
If you plan to deal with chicken meat not only for home consumption, the question of how to quickly pluck a chicken must be resolved in favor of special tools and attachments. Otherwise, labor costs will not be comparable with economic efficiency.
Subtleties and nuances of fast plucking
There are many secrets to quick plucking. One of the most important is related to how the slaughter took place. If the chicken was slaughtered without preliminary stunning, its muscle tone would be higher, making it harder to pluck the feathers. Slaughter with stunning makes plucking easier, speeding up this painstaking work.
When plucking feathers, it is necessary to control the direction of their growth. Large ones are pulled out one by one. Exclusively in the direction of growth. Do not grab them in bunches, otherwise the skin will be damaged. Small feathers and down can be plucked several at a time and without reference to the direction of growth.
Also, don’t delay. You need to process the chicken immediately after slaughter. Otherwise, the carcass will harden, and plucking all the feathers without damaging the skin will become an impossible task.
How to singe a carcass
Singeing the down is the final stage of plucking. You can use a lit burner on a gas stove or a blowtorch. Do not expose the chicken to prolonged heating over an open fire. 2-3 seconds is enough to get rid of the remaining small feathers. If you neglect this rule, you can damage the skin and melt the subcutaneous fat.
Before singeing, many recommend sprinkling the carcass with flour, so that there will be less soot on the skin and it will be easier to wash. In any case, after completing all the procedures, the chicken is thoroughly washed.
How carcasses are plucked on poultry farms
For large-scale slaughter of chickens, highly automated devices are used for plucking, which reduces the time required to process the carcass.
At poultry farms, plucking is performed by a conveyor method. The bird hung upside down, is scalded with steam generators or in containers with hot water after slaughter. Then it is moved to plucking devices. Their operating principle can be compared with a centrifuge, on the inner surface of which special nozzles are placed. After that, the chicken is brought to a marketable appearance manually.
Large farms also use dry plucking. The resulting feathers and down, as in domestic conditions, are used as raw materials for the textile industry.
The use of chicken meat and eggs in the household has a long history. The basic methods of plucking have not changed for many years. Keeping chickens for personal use, it is not at all necessary to stock up on special tools or devices. They will be needed if the livestock is large. You cannot do without mechanization even during slaughter.
