alive

[dragonlady7]

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we survived our first chicken processing of the season.

more chickens than we’ve ever done at once before, purely by accident– we had such problems with predation last year we bought extra chicks this time and um nobody has killed any of them. also we switched hatcheries so we could avoid the risk of them being in the mail; this guy drives a delivery route all thru the region, so we meet him in a parking lot to get the babies, and it’s zero-waste because he’s got sanitizable plastic reusable crates he uses and we return, and it turns out not only do we lose zero in shipping, we also tend to lose fewer in the succeeding days. Guess it is a bit of a stress to have them go thru the postal system?

anyway we did manage to like, actually do the thing, and we were done before 1pm, which is not too shabby.

Then in the afternoon was packaging, as ever. We have a smaller crew this year, and so we had three people, mostly, doing the work of what’s usually been done by five. So we split off the separate bit, which is cutting up the birds for parts– that was saved for Wednesday morning. So we just packaged the whole birds, for whole-bird sale, and it dragged on but we got it done.

The birds for parts, we put in the wheeled bins and dumped ice on and stuck in the walk-in cooler, and then Wednesday morning just BIL and me came out to cut them up. We did so in the new nearly-finished commercial kitchen, and the very exciting part was that we used the brand-new never-before-used vacuum sealer machine that’s in there.

It took a little tweaking; BIL had watched a couple of YouTube videos on how they operate, and then had to phone a friend– actually the other guy at the market who sells the same stuff, but has a slightly larger operation and so has owned a vacuum-sealer for a bit longer. But we got it to work and it did work a treat, and we discovered that we definitely need to come up with a workflow for it, but also the fact that I know exactly how the packaging generally works (two thighs per pack, four legs per pack, six wings per pack, six tenders per pack, two spines per soup pack, variations as called for by damages) and thus didn’t need anything explained really helped things go more smoothly, so I did get to feel good about myself. I was slower than BIL, because I was doing all of the working of the vacuum-sealing machine and the distribution of the finished packages onto trays and such, and he was like “oh this is much slower than using ziplocs” until I pointed out that long ago we discovered that the thing to do was apply the labels to the ziplocs the day before so you could just package straight into bags and not fuss with the roll of labels, but we had not done that with the vacuum-seal bags, and he realized that no, it’s true, the lack of ergonomic workflow and preparations like pre-labeling was what was slowing us down. Using the sealer is not prohibitively slower than ziplocs, and the bags cost slightly less per item, and are likely to be much more durable, and do look more professional. So…

anyway. we got to the end of the time that we had and we still have one more big wheelie bin full of birds, so those are still in the walk-in and we have to go back out there tomorrow. i pre-labeled the bags and cleared another work surface and i hope we can be more ergonomic today and fly through ‘em, because after lunch we have to help Middle-Little sister move some furniture. (She bought a house! did I say? anyway. excitement!!!) (Your picture was not posted)