 Elizabeth Roma and I own Roma's butchery in South Royalton right up on 14. I just opened that up during the pandemic because I'm crazy. So before that my husband and I own and run putting down Roots Farm which is the hillside behind us where we raise during the peak of the summer usually 1500 birds for eggs and another like 300 for meat birds and then in the past I would raise between 20 to 40 pigs on pasture. Currently not doing that because now I'm running a butcher shop too. So let's see here so that's our farm and we later bought this we my husband and I were living in a yurt for a couple years and when this house opened up the owners were looking to sell. We decided to move into a building so here we are. So oh yes these are all Freedom Rangers so a typical thing for us to do is we buy Cornish Cross for that first batch but then everything after that is all Freedom Rangers and the reason we do that is because spring and summer is so quirky here and when markets start it makes it easier because Freedom Rangers take eight to ten weeks and by the time you get the chicks and it's warm enough to put them outside and on pasture it's not the timing doesn't work. So what we do is Cornish Cross is because they take four to six weeks so we do Cornish Cross at the very beginning of the season because a lot quicker to get them up to size while we have that really funky weather we have chicks and they're in the brooder and the house and the grass still isn't ready and you know a big reason that I wanted to do this workshop is because like Caroline is saying I can at my butcher shop I can sell Misty Null Birds it's a Vermont poultry farm but it's mostly indoors from what I understand and what I've seen and I am wanting to support the local farmers small farmers that are doing pasture raised and there's no way that we can do that with the way regulations are with the state because I can't even bring pasture raised slaughtered birds on farm to my shop part amount and sell them it's not allowed so I can't even bring in whole birds that are from farmers on slaughtered and sold to my shop I can't sell them in my shop so what I decided was that instead of like I am still supporting Missy Null there they are a Vermont based poultry farm and so I still sell Missy Null Birds that I do part out for the shop but I'm doing these workshops so that our community can go out support local farmers buy five birds from a farmer by ten birds from a farmer when they're ready instead of just one at the market on that day you buy ten from that farmer support that farmer bring them home thumb break them down to what you want and put them into your freezer the way you want so that's kind of my goal is to get our community to start thinking about how to support our farmers touched on in those things so all right so let's get to killing some things so it's easier hold on to a chicken by its feet then by the wings that flap and then gets all messy so it's just easier it's also when trying to grab them you can like get low and grab at a leg is easier than trying to like jump at the bird so and for everyone that's here I am left-handed so you'll see a lot of my methods are done left-handed so just kind of switch it around for your right-handedness this bird this is my kill cone so I've had this cone for a long time at the farm we also have a whole board of about five cones but I kind of use this one for small slaughters and it's easy I also set up this way because this is where I'm working and this is where the guts are going so I'm not doing too much movement and this way the blood is here I've learned throughout the years you can kill you can have your cones over here and this over there but then the cleanup and the cleanup is so frustrating so you just once you're done slaughtering you just want to be done so I've made it to where my bucket this this is taking it to the compost the tractor so I'm setting up a kill cone where the blood's going into it it's where the guts are going and the feet are going if we're not saving them and then that way I just have to get on this tractor and drive it away so you also see over here in the plucker over here I have this grate this grate will catch feathers and I'll just throw them into the bucket and that way it's an easier cleanup than the feathers all over your driveway the feathers all over your yard or what not it's just small little methods I've found helped make this go by a little bit quicker so we're gonna take a nice pointy knife the kill so things that think about wind killing is that what if you want to take your neck if you push on the back of your neck where your spine is and if you roll your fingers forward you're pulling all of your veins and arteries to the front mostly so that's what I'm doing with my birds I'm taking my fingers I'm starting at the back of the neck and I'm pushing my fingers and pushing everything forward and then from there I'm what everything is what all is forward I'm then going in with the knife going in to the middle of the neck right at that spine and just barely like if this is the vertebrae I'm going in right at it and then cutting out feathers are hard to cut they're not an easy thing to cut they cause problems they dull your knife so trying to cut this way with the knife you're not getting it and you're gonna miss it or you're just you're gonna make the chicken very uncomfortable with a couple nicks to where if you're going in cutting out you're getting out the arteries and then I go also once I've cut open the neck I kind of roll the skin back and look and see if both veins are shooting and if they're both shooting blood or there's blood coming out like okay I've got the bird is gonna bleed out well if I don't then I kind of graze with the knife either side of the neck to make sure that the blood is pumping out because you want the blood out if blood stays in it's gonna cause rot later on in your process so the more blood that's like why we're not stopping the heart we want the heart to pump that blood out so that so we can yep no no it's forward yeah so you're making sure that you're past all of this yeah so I'm I'm pretty much I'm pushing my fingers forward and then it just kind of holding on to the neck that we have something sturdy to hold on to and then with my knife hand I'm going in like right in front of that and pushing in going across and then coming out so that's my method of doing it other people have different methods my husband doesn't even like doing that method because you're also cutting the the throat which then they can suck blood up into which then also is a problem so my husband likes to try to like nick both that's his method everyone has a different method some people use loppers which is really easy if you can put a chicken in hold the head down and someone lop it and that's a quick method as well then you don't have to think about the head except for when you have a chicken that's kind of still alive and jumps out with the no head and spins around that's entertaining what I do my method is I put the chicken in since I'm left-handed I put the chicken in so that it's facing to the right if that makes sense so you'll see here I'm putting the chicken in so the head it's facing that way is that right yes nope I'm doing it wrong I'm backwards I'm usually on this side so it's very backwards for me so here we go so with my right hand I'm grabbing hold a neck and right right here at the jawline okay so it's not up here you're not trying to grab the neck up here wherever it's you're going right at this jawline right here okay and so I take my fingers and I just kind of rolling forward and I feel all of this right here and so then from there what I'm doing is I'm just taking it go a knife in in the middle going through and then coming out and see I'm checking both sides and I see it flowing through I also like to just hold it for a minute I don't want to deal with the mess later I don't want to deal with me I don't want to deal with that so I just kind of hold it and let it help drain out and keep it all in my bucket if you're doing production this is probably not something you want to do I'm wearing a skirt today so I don't want to get so do you see me in grundies or overalls it's a big production day yeah not cutting feathers not cutting bone and that way I can just keep using this knife to hold like all 30 hundred birds that one of those scalder you're killing the next one then you have someone else it's it's it's really helpful to have two people a tag team at least so you have someone doing the dirty bits and someone in the clean bits that's always really helpful because then the person that's dealing with the blood and the poop is over here the person that's dealing with like the clean carcass or mostly clean carcass is over here so on the table so now right now the temperature and the scalder is 140 which is actually pretty low recommended temperature is between 130 and 170 so things that have I have a kill knife and then I have my I have a fatter knife that I use to actually do all the other bits here on the table it's kind of fun to also be something in something dry it gets pretty wet over here so there's always you can use a apron like this it's the plastic plastic aprons they last one time this thing has been through so many things so Amazon is a great thing to find an apron that has a little bit more durability to it so this piece here chicken plucker from Amazon as well I used to rent the same exact one just not as pretty from True Value you can rent chicken plucker from True Value not too expensive though once we started doing this quite often so I had to buy one of our own so this is I've seen I've worked in so many different places with different chicken pluckers as a home processor this thing is awesome it's so easy to clean it is take it all apart they can spray this down take the feathers off spray this down take the feathers off and most pluckers you can't take this apart it is one plastic box all right be on the safe side kind of lock it down because sometimes chickens get rowdy in here so with the plucker from True Value I guess it was a older model and they didn't think through safety measures so we were able to connect to the electrical foot pedal so every time that we were plucking my husband would turn on the foot pedal stand there pluck the birds and then be able to get off the foot pedal and then go on but this has a safety mechanism that we haven't fixed yet so it's you have to go under turn on go back turn it off and it's a little bit more of a pain but we gotta get that altered so alright so bird wise so right now we're it says we're at 168 so we'll see how that goes so bird is dead it's not kicking it's not flinching that way I don't get water all over myself I use two hands that way when I put the bird in I kind of twist the legs and that way I can move it around like this because if you're just dunking you're not getting in between there and you're not gonna get all the feathers off so then I'm checking it's not ready yet that was too much of a pull to try to get them off so some places like kiss the cow they have the scalder you put the bird in see that was a nice pull there was no give to it so kiss cow has a scalder you put the bird in it flips it and it just keeps slipping it in the hot scalding water and then it just comes out and it's beautiful so for this plucker to help keep the feathers at bay I use the water as well and there is the magic so this could have probably sat in a scholar for maybe like another second or two and these feathers on the wings would have been gone so when you have a team one person skulls and that way they can keep track so I keep track I say okay that was in for 10 seconds next time it's in for 12 seconds next time it's in for 13 or 14 seconds or okay we turn the water on so you want to stay one consistent scholar because if you don't and this person does it for 10 that person counts differently and their 10 is actually a 15 and then you have skin coming off so kind of it's better to have one person be that job so that's something else to kind of take into account so it's it's a good practice to have your table be the clean place so here rinse it off before it comes here things that I first do take off the dirty bits the dirty bits include the feet they come right off that's one of the first things there's a lot of poo that can be on the feet so I take them right off keep them somewhere else and then this is most people that use feet to process you're cooking them down again scalding them to then peel them and all that if you have one of those scalders the whole chicken goes into the scalder including the feet that's when those feet that's art that's peeling right there for you so it just kind of varies so now the dirty feet are off I'll spin it around and then I will have the dirty head as another place and I'll just take that right off and so now my more dirty bits are out of the way so here I'm just cleaning off any other excess feathers so something I learned when I was at the slaughterhouses hair feathers all that is considered dirty skin is clean hair is dirty because hair animal hair human hair it all has debris dirt things on it so you want to get that off and so when I met my slaughterhouse if we see hair on a carcass we're not just picking it off we're not rinsing it off we're cutting that hair wherever that hair is we're cutting that skin off because hair if you're rinsing it that rinsing just spreads whatever is on that hair onto the carcass if you're just plucking it's still there you just can't see it so by cutting it off you're just getting rid of whatever is on there and that is really important for us to have safe food that we can continue to keep doing these on-farm slaughters and keep eating so that's that's one thing one of the state inspectors taught me at the slaughter houses is about cutting it off so so here I've gotten my carcass kind of as clean as I want it I'm kind of keeping my table clean grab that hose Caroline so when I'm doing a big job I'll have two tables one is like the the getting rid of feathers and all the dirty bits and the other table is for when someone's actually eviscerating so can have that again Caroline so here I this is one method of holding birds trying to hold a bird and it not slip out of your hand is very hard I've learned that you can grab it by the the wings like this and then you can flip it around spin around figure out how you want to get it as clean as possible this way without it falling so from here other methods that I do are I don't keep the Pope's nose I'm not a Pope's nose kind of person so I cut it right off for those that that don't know Pope's nose is the tail so on the tail itself this is the chicken tail so there's a gland right here you can keep the Pope's nose on people love it think it's delicious I don't have time for it and I'm in production mode so I take it right off it makes the next step a lot easier but you can just dip that gland right off and leave the nose on if you want so I've taken the nose off and you can see here I've exposed already where I'm going to be going next but before I get there I also I flip it over and put it on its breasts this is a retail look to things if you open up the neck this side when you're splitting open this here you're exposing the breasts for ripping and it doesn't it's not as good as a presentation and it's going to ruin your breast meat skin stuff so what I do is I always turn my chicken over to be on the backside and that's where I'm cutting so that I'm not ruining ruining that skin on the breast so I hold the neck squeeze the skin real tight like this and then you can just take your knife and it just opens right up I barely even I'm not even cutting I'm just kind of grazing and by pulling the skin it pulls it right out and while I still have it all in my hand I'm taking everything and then grabbing the neck and pulling it apart and kind of opening up like this from there you go back in and you can find the throat and the those two things the right there we go thanks so you have your two pieces here that you're grabbing and then you're pulling them from the skin and all the way to finding the food sack and you're then loosening up that sack and getting that all loose so that is the second step so now I've opened this up and I've loosened this so that'll be easier to pull later on and I've also left a lot of skin so that when I take that neck off and the neck is going to be really stabby actually it's got that bony bits this skin will help protect it so if you're putting into a package it's not breaking the plastic on the package so I'm going to turn it back over back onto its backs exposing the breasts and then so the vents is here and I've gone right below by cutting the Pope's nose off and you can kind of lift up almost here and right this is that tailbone so I take the knife in right at the tailbone and then I lift that up that hole now so the you'll see the intestines is right above this okay and then I go on either side well I start on one side and I kind of do like a lap around that whole vent so I start on one side exposing it and I keep coming around here and then back around to the other side trying to show you but it's on the wrong side so so now I've I've not let go of the vent I'm keeping the vent holding on to it as I'm playing with as I'm working with the knife around the vent so now that I'm holding on to it I'm loosening up everything that's around it and then bring it down off the table so so now all the dirty bits are this way okay so I'm keeping as much poop away from the carcass as possible and then from there I'm going back in and I'm scooping and sweeping to try to get all the rest of the bits out so that's the intestines and then from there you're looking for the heart the livers the lungs and the stomach which is the gizzard for those that like eating gizzards and so what I what we loosened up here is now being pulled out this other side so there is most of the dance you have the liver you have the heart you have the kidney you have the gizzard you have the intestines away so from here I detached the gall bladder from the liver my method is by taking the gall bladder and squeezing it and just pulling apart of course it's gonna explode on me aren't you so there's the the liver and the heart the gall bladder is here for those that want to keep the stomach these are two pieces one piece you can pull apart the piece you can't so I just use a knife taken both out and so all of this goes into there and so pose yes please so you can keep it so again as I was processing I nicked one of the intestines and so I am trying to keep this space as clean as possible all the time that way that this carcass stays as mostly clean as possible at all times so now that I've pulled out that the things I've missed are the oh it's a boy the the balls and the lungs so the lungs you have to scoop with your fingers if these are the lungs they're the rib cage you're taking your fingers and sweeping your fingers between the rib cages it will feel very flat you need to dig your fingernails in and try to loosen up those ribs so that's what's happening here and I'm taking my fingers and getting the lungs loosened from the ribs on the other side and you have them right here so they're very hot pink color and then depending on the bird you also want to take out the the jibbly bits so these these balls are kind of small they're not pine nuts so there we have an empty carcass that you can rinse off and throw into your cold tub I also like to prep the neck by cutting in as deep as I can right here not too far I don't want to cut all the way and then I spin the neck because neck is great to help with broth and soups and I just kind of stick it back into the carcass and then that way when you're processing birds trying to keep all the pieces together with that bird the neck the heart the liver it gets jumbly so this way this is one thing you don't have to keep track of with each bird so again I then take the bird do another nice rinse including inside and it goes into my cold water and that is the dance I'll do it again and then I'll welcome everyone to try their hand at it so I'll go through some of the things with you that I do here at my shop with the chickens and you'll see different things you might do different things with your chickens so the first thing I do you see all of them they take out that gland the Pope's nose so all these chickens have still their tails and you can also see the hole is a lot bigger those bones are gone they they cut them right back where these bones actually those aren't cut back they're just soft so these birds are soft they're young they're soft birds anyways first thing I do when processing I'll do it quick and then I'll take it a little bit slower at least it tells me I go too fast all the time this is that skin that I talked about in the front that I leave is a nice flap to not ruin the breast you can see they do the same process so they're not ruining that breast meat or breast skin so I take that off this I put towards dog food it's just something I do here at the shop we have a lot of dog owners that love the dog food that we make so this here is the wings and what I do is I flip them over so I'm taking the bird and it's saying like this I'm going like this that's kind of the motion I'm holding the wing at so I'm holding it out and in between there there's a little the kind of armpit and I'm just grazing the armpit I'm not trying to cut into it I'm just grazing it opens up you can see there is the the joints from that joint you can keep going you kind of cut away from the breast meat that is under there so you're cutting away and taking that off and while it's still in my hand before I do anything else I just flip it around there is on this wing tip there is a knob right here I put my knife literally on top of that knob okay I'm not putting on the side I'm not trying to and I'm just resting my knife and then pressure okay and it should come right open and that is so when you go out for wing night this is not the wing you get the wing you get is then cut again so just know you're only getting half of it the tip itself goes right into our dog food second I do the other side so open up the arm again I cut or graze right at the armpit to open up and find the joint once I see the joint that little ball I kind of keep cutting away you're going to get some of that breast meat that's okay that's a pretty decent size breast so again I flip it over I find that ball joint and this one is not as happy as others right so dog food wings I then flip it back I kind of hold one leg up and I try to keep as much skin on as possible I'm a skin person I love skin so they see not everyone does but to do so I leave as much skin on my breast as possible so here my leg I kind of cut towards closer to the leg so I just like release the skin from there it's it's already open so I'm just cutting the skin and grazing the skin to open it up and then I switch over and I do the other side up here opening it up and sometimes the birds have been sitting so they're kind of like this in this motion so what I like to do is bend the legs back to make a nice sturdy surface for myself so most of the time when you first open that up this it's still going to be kind of wobbly but by kind of bending the legs out you're giving yourself a more solid surface from there I like to take my knife you can find that center breastbone here I don't pick a side I let my knife pick a side because by picking a side you're just not going to end up where you want to be anyways so I just let the knife kind of ride down the side and then whatever side it starts going down I continue and this is where the wishbone is so once I hit the wishbone it'll be a nice solid I kind of curve my knife and come to the side of the wishbone and then just open it up here like this so I'm taking the breast off of both the wishbone and the the rest of the the back of the chicken and then I'll continue to release it off of the back of the chicken here so off the carcass so now as I come around this there is still meat on this backside that usually gets forgotten about so what I like to do as I keep coming around I don't fully just cut down I kind of keep going around because that's the easiest way to get that meat off is by going around the carcass so this is what I end up with so when I take one breast off this is what I end up with is this extra piece here and your whole breast but within this whole breast you have I call this stir fry meat so that goes into stir fry this it had a little piece of bone that I saw on it as I cut it because the bones are soft I throw in the dog food dogs love bones also on the breast you have your tender here the tender is literally just ripped right off you don't need a knife for this you just pull it right off and you can set that aside so then this is your skin on breast so there we have one and so then now I'm going to do the other one so now I can hold the carcass in place and a little steady and ride my knife along the side of that bone and down the wishbone on the other side now you all can be very gentle and slow and patient at this but just know how are you going to make a really good stock of there isn't some meat left on the bone so that's kind of my take on like you can be perfect where you can just get most of it so again here's my whole breast I'm going to take off my stir fry meat I'm going to take off my tender so a little bit of that tender kind of broke away I sell retail so I like to keep things pretty and clean so I put this meat here that's kind of flapping in the stir fry and there's my tender so I also with retail also like to have a clean carcass you probably do too I take off those odd bits and give those to the dogs so here I have two nice breasts I have some tenders I've got some wings so far next while that the while it's still standing here in front of me I have this meat that's kind of left over what I do with this meat is I ride my knife down either side of the wishbone and I have more stir fry meat and then I go on the inside and take this out and this is kind of rippable once you get to this side and this is more stir fry meat so I build up quite a bit of stir fry meat over a couple birds and then a lot of the bones I put right towards dog food now the next thing I do is I take it and I laid the chicken kind of like this a very splayed out kind of way again I'm taking it like this and what I do here while it's sitting on its side I start on the back end I take my knife along there then there's going to be a hump where there's the bone connection go around it and then come back down so it I see that pattern it kind of goes like this and then dips and then back out so while it's in this while I still have it in my hand I look at the thigh and the leg and I go on the leg side of things I'm a leg lady so I look at the leg find the fat and right at that fat line I cut you end up with a nice sliced leg and thigh so again yep that's just how it is that that connection so again I'm leaving the kind of the fat on the thigh and having a nice leg you can say and so leaving the fat on see that fat line I put my knife around the other side of it and then just cut down and it will be nice and quick and smooth so right so here you have soup stock dog food chicken wings chicken thighs stew meat legs tenders and breasts so I'm gonna do that again a little bit slower and if anybody wants to get closer to see what I'm up to you're welcome so again I'm taking off the skin here and putting it towards the dogs I'm taking the arms and I'm kind of like flipping them out so I'm rotating them out and finding that armpit just putting my knife there and they'll open right up if there's no pressure by your hand it's not gonna open up like that okay so you need to give pressure graze your knife and it'll open up at that armpit and then from there you can cut out while it's still in my hand I flip it over and cut down on that knob and I will come along and show everyone personally how this all goes down this is again opening up the thighs making a nice sturdy surface take my knife I don't even pick it picks for me come down one side so I move the carcass around a lot so that I can just keep moving with my knife I don't try to work around it I move the carcass around though my old boss you would say do less of that and just more figuring out a better technique because the less time you pick up and put down the the more efficient you are so that's why I like while the wings still in my hand that's when I take the wing tip off taken down the breast past the wishbone going along the internal cavity going around the side Lisa what what do you say this is called is this this meat the oyster so put the legs up so see I've come too high a little bit and I'm hitting bone that's not lit so then I have to come back with my knife to let it hit that and then I come back down so you'll you might hit that and that's fine just keep just come back and come a little bit higher and you'll be able to make that scoop again the fat is on the thigh not on the leg and see I've cut to see I keep that fat on the leg on the thigh otherwise it won't cut so that first cut you see I stopped so I left some of that fat so you got to go all the way so again taking the thigh off so leaving the fat on there cut straight down that is the breakdown that I do here at the shop can you hear me one more bird some other things that a lot of folks want to know about is bone and breast and spatchcock so this is taken the excess skin off so for spatchcock there's what you get your what you're doing is just taking that back spine out you can do it with a knife by taking the knife down the back side of either side of the spine so take the pope's nose off down either side or get some nice chicken scissors and do the same method so you're going down one side just crunching bones here let's start going no I need a little bit stronger these are I bought them from a restaurant store as like chicken processing scissors so I know that there Lisa has some scissors that are an Asian style chicken scissors that she cuts right through things I don't commonly use a knife I usually just take mine or commonly use scissors I just take my knife and I have the spine like this so this is that same spinal area and so what we're doing when we're cutting this is we're going right along either side of that spine see that so this is the spine you're just cutting those bones right along there you can also take your knife and cut them you see that they are cuttable with a knife so and left awkward so once you get to here I like to also win spatch cocking I take my knife down the center of the kind of breastbone area to help that separate and then give it a little pump and it breaks the breast and so by doing this and then tucking in the wings I can never tuck in the wings anyway so by doing this and having a nice flat bone in breasts you can throw this on the grill this thing on the grill right and so you're evenly cooking it compared to a carcass it's like this trying to cook on the grill and this is getting cooked but this is not as well it's where when you have it all splayed out like this you're getting a whole thing kind of evenly cooked so yeah so this is spatch cock and they say that can't I mean I would just cut the wing tips off someone was saying they tuck the wings in and I'm not sure how that happens maybe it's like this and then that goes on the grill like this and then voila so that's another method you want to grab one more for me right so lastly this is last one I'm gonna do for you is a bone and breast so and you see like as I do things I like I I rotate the wings I kind of keep moving I don't just keep trying to go for that thing I put my knife on that knob and I'm working at the the piece itself it's a soft connection so it'll come off I use gravity a lot to do things for me so for a bone and breast I take the legs off first and that take this breast itself and so and it's really soft right down the middle here so if you take your knife and go right down this you get to the wishbone here you can just kind of spread it open and then on either side find the wishbone they'll pop up like this and take that off so you're leaving it some meat on there but you're getting this other product that you want which bone and breasts on the grill is also nice so again I put a knife mark right down the middle and then I give it a crack and so then it kind of opens that all up and that's a bone and