Have you ever encountered a psychotic rooster?
You know the type. The beady eyes. The untrustworthy gait.
I want to kill you and your family. And your cat.
First it attacks your dog. Then your cat. Then your toddler.
And then one day you walk outside and turn the corner and then BAM – it nails you in the calf! Dripping blood down your injured leg, you try to escape – but the rooster is one step ahead of you. With a great leap into the air, it flaps towards your face, tearing at your hair and removing your eyeballs with his razor-sharp beak…
…and as the blood loss increases and you fall heavily to the ground, you regret having never had the guts to strike while you could.
In your last moments, though eyeless, you suddenly see the future in frightening clarity: this rooster will feast on your corpse, eventually killing anyone and everything in its megalomaniacal path to absolute power.
Don’t let that happen. When a rooster goes bad, it’s time to eat him. Today you’re going to learn how to convert him from a barnyard bully into a superb supper.
Are you ready to learn how to butcher a chicken? Today’s post is rather gory but better the rooster than you, right?
So, you ask yourself, “how can I butcher a rooster?” It’s not that hard. It starts with slaughtering.
Slaughtering a Rooster
There are multiple schools of thought on the best way to kill poultry.
A common old method was to swing the bird and snap its neck. Picture a gnarled old grandmother brutally executing birds in the poultry yard and you get the picture.
Poultry farmers like Joel Salatin usually go for the
killer klown
killing cone method. With this approach you invert the bird head-down into a downward-facing cone (like
this one
), then slit its throat.
We’ve tried that method and don’t like it. We prefer the swift finality of a decapitation.
Machete style.
If you nail two big nails about 1.5 inches apart, you can tuck the rooster’s head between them to hold him down, then decapitate the bird with one blow through the neck, like so:
Simple and quick. Just make sure you’re good with a machete – there’s no need to cause undue suffering, even in the case of an evil psychotic rooster.
Now you have a dead bird. Whew. That was hard to do, wasn’t it?
Your toddler-spurring days are over, punk.
Go ahead. Sit down. You did it. You took a life. Have a cigarette or something and calm your nerves… because it gets uglier before it gets better.
Scalding and Plucking a Rooster
Now it’s time to scald the bird in preparation for plucking.
Heating a big stockpot of water on an outdoor rocket stove (or in this case, a SilverFire TLUD stov e) is a great approach.
Just don’t fill the pot too high because the displacement effect of dunking a dead rooster will send boiling water onto your nice shoes if you’re not careful. Just over half-way is usually good enough. You don’t want the water boiling hot, just somewhere between about 150 and 180 or so. Think “steaming hot.”
Once you have your steaming hot water, take the rooster by the legs and dunk it multiple times, swishing it up and down to saturate the feathers.
Do this for about 30-45 seconds, then pull it out. You don’t want to cook the skin but you do want to loosen the feathers so they’re easy to pull out in clumps. The wing feathers are the worst. If you can yank one of those out without too much strain after dunking the bird, you’re set.
Now it’s time to start plucking. Though you can pluck while crouching on the ground or sitting at a table, it’s easier to hang up the bird. Copper wire or long twist ties work excellently for this.
If you have a porch, consider screwing in a strong bar between two of the support columns. It makes a great place to hang game in need of butchering.
Once the bird is hung, start yanking out feathers.
Until, at long last, the bird is naked.
Once the bird is naked… it’s time for the scary stuff.
You’ve gotten this far… can you go ALL THE WAY???
Gutting a Rooster
You can start at either end first, but it generally makes sense to remove the crop at the beginning. Do this by carefully slitting the skin of the neck up near the chest.
The crop will be in there. Just find the esophagus and follow it back.
You’ll find it. It’s an inch or two deeper into the chest below the slit in the neck on this bird. Ah – here it is!
Once you take that out, it’s time to remove the feet. Find the front of the knee joint and carefully slit it with your knife, severing the tendons. It’s as easy as 1-2-3!
Once the feet are off, it’s time for the tricky part: gutting the bird. Gutting a rooster isn’t THAT hard, but you need to be careful about it or you’ll create a mess.
To start, carefully make a slit just below the pelvis and a couple of inches up from the cloaca. There’s a layer of skin, then a layer of fat and membrane, then a cavity for the organs. You want to make an opening without cutting into any of the organs.
Go slowly and use a sharp knife. A Ka-Bar knife like this one is good for butchering since it holds a killer edge and has enough heft to cut through bone. That’s what’s being used here, though many people prefer a good filet knife for delicate work.
Once you have your opening, cram your hand deep in there, grasp the guts and start pulling. The objective is to pull them out without tearing the intestinal tract and releasing chicken poop into the meat.
Yank!
This image reminds us of the aftermath of a particularly unfortunate dining experience at Taco Madre’s…
Don’t yank too hard, though – you’re not taking the guts completely out at this point. The last piece left attached should be the final piece of the intestines attached to the undamaged cloaca.
Like this:
Now go ahead and cut around the cloaca, again being careful not to sever the intestine. A quick zip around and you’re set. Just cut the whole thing out.
After doing that, feel around inside the cavity to make sure you didn’t miss any bits and pieces.
Speaking of bits and pieces, there are some organs you might want to keep, starting with the heart:
And the liver:
I suppose you can eat the other weird bits too… but who would want to?
Washing, Chilling and Aging a Butchered Rooster
Finally, wash the entire chicken well and immerse it in ice water for a few hours or just bag it up and put it in the refrigerator.
Don’t put any animal directly into the freezer of the meat will be tough. Give it some time to wait and age at a higher temperature. Even a day or two isn’t a bad idea, provided it’s kept good and cold.
Now – after seeing this bloody process, who would want to go through this mess?
How about:
- People who care about where their food comes from
- People who don’t wish to support the endless cruelty of factor farms
- People who are saying NO to GMOs
- People who enjoy the taste of truly good chicken
- People who need to dispose of mean roosters and old laying hens
- People who believe in living a DIY life
Some of us fit in all the above categories. Despite tales to the contrary, there’s nothing like the flavor of home-raised free-range chickens and roosters.
Even the taste of old and tough birds is light years ahead of store-bought, antibiotic-ridden, chemically treated and manure-soaked meat birds. Just cook old birds on low heat in a crock pot. Curry! Potatoes! Carrots!
Learn to butcher a rooster and you’ll not only get rid of a psychotic killer – you’ll gain a whole new appreciation for real food.
Wow, you can get ANYthing at Amazon!
I feel I must add a caution. My former husband nearly cut off one of his fingers when chopping off the head of a chicken with an axe. It caused him to revise his routine by using a piece of 2 by 4 to hold down the head, rather than just his hand. It was a memorable day, requiring me to pack up the kids, a diaper bag for the baby, and drive him to the hospital, then come back home hours later and deal with the dead chicken.
Also, you don’t say anything about what happens immediately after cutting off the head. We developed a habit of tying string to the chicken’s legs before killing it, so after it stopping moving, it could be hung up to drain. It was my job to hold the chicken neck down until it stopped moving. The time we killed our old rooster, I couldn’t hold him. He was too strong.
Good cautions there. The machete helps a lot due to the longer blade. The 2 x 4 is a good idea.
And yes… they run off headless, wrecking havoc and spurting blood.
We butchered some roosters last year and refrigerated them for 2 days. They were only 6 months old, but tough as nails to eat. My forefathers didn’t have refrigeration so they butchered and ate them right away. Do you think they were eating really tough birds? How long do you let yours stay in the fridge before you move them to the freezer?
Yes – our ancestors probably were eating tough birds, though they were more clever with aging and processing than we are in this age of refrigeration.
We generally leave the birds in the fridge for a couple of days, just like you. If it’s a leaner variety of bird, the crockpot is usually the way to go. Also, cooking on low heat in a regular oven or when making soup helps quite a bit. Slow and low makes for more tender meat. We’ve made the mistake of boiling a bird before and getting almost inedibly hard meat.
Nice photos! Wait, that sounds morbid, but you know what I mean. We decapitate too, with a hatchet, me holding the body of the bird and my husband stretching out the neck and chopping. We then put it neck down into a cone-shaped piece of chicken wire nailed to a stake to let it bleed out. Can you tell we’ve come a long way from thinking we would NEVER be able to butcher our cute little chickens? It only took one rooster attack on our then three year old son to change that mindset…
@Ivy Mae
Yes. Roosters seem particularly prone to attacking small children.
The point which really opened our eyes to the nature of chickens was the day we slaughtered a bird for being mean… and were suddenly surrounded by the rest of the flock, begging for scraps from the butchering table.
The creatures have no souls.
Excellent article, David. Our technique for slaughtering requires two people. We lay the bird flat on the ground. One person holds the legs pulled taught. The other person pulls both wings back and steps on the outer edge of the outstretched feathers and holds the head down and chops it off. It is quick and the bird doesn’t flop around.
My wife makes excellent rooster dishes like chicken and dumplings and chicken soup. The trick is to cook the rooster in the crockpot for 48 hours on low. Super tender and delicious.
Thank you.
Sounds like a great method, though the flopping around entertains children. Why would you want to remove that joy from their young lives?
Yeah, slow cooking seems to do it for us as well. And curry. Mmm.