Killing and Eating Roosters and Geese
In the summertime? What the pluck!
Roosters
Sometimes you discover that the batch of mixed-sex Buckeye chickens you ordered from the online hatchery are 90% roosters. Here you are early in the morning, you and a couple of your kids, butchering four of them in July.
Snapping the neck instead of cutting off the neck combined with several good dunks in hot water made the plucking very easy.
Two of them went direct into the stockpot for a broth.
The other two rested in the freezer for three days before being roasted for Sunday dinner. Quite yummy with a green chile sauce made with a bit of the broth from the stockpot. You have a couple of young men over for dinner who aree fascinated by the process and ask to help next time you have some birds to slaughter.
Geese
Geese-the other red meat.
Sometimes your brother has goslings hatch out of season. Here you are in an early morning in July, you and a couple of your kids and your brother’s kids butchering 4 geese.
We skinned them instead of plucking. Waterfowl are hard to pluck. We haven’t hit on a good technique for plucking them yet.
We walked away with two, he kept two. Except he has two young adult children who had never butchered geese or anything else for that matter who joined in for the experience of it. We gave them the drumsticks to take home with them. It’s important that everyone involved feel a sense of reward.
The two geese are currently resting in our fridge before making the move to the freezer.
Giblets
We feel that eating as much giblets as palatable is important. Both for health purposes and also for the medium-term sense of reward. People who haven’t had offal in awhile will often feel an extra dose of wellbeing over the next few days and develop inexplicable cravings later for the giblets.
The rooster liver sauteed with onions was incredible on a salad. The goose liver was ok. The hearts, sauteed in butter, were also incredible.
As a new thing, we also made a meal with the gizzards. We cleaned out the crop, peeled off the inner layer, sliced them thin, cooked them on low for about an hour, them fried them with squash and bell peppers for a stir fry (along with a small salad using our tomatos and cucumbers). The results were mixed. They had a nice flavor but the texture was crunchy like raw celery. Some of use thought it was great, some of us hated it. Next time we would try doing them low and slow for many hours.
