Earthy-green, bright, and warming — this is what chicken tastes like. My mouth watered as I carved into the roast chicken, and familiar aromatics filled the air. It’s not anything you could get around town or even in a big city. No one would ask for the recipe, and there isn’t one really to write down. What rested on my father’s Sunday table was home cooking.
The whole roaster was only a few shades darker than the white platter it sat on. My father, ever health-conscious, lightly coated the skin with olive oil. He used no salt on account of his high blood pressure (the tablespoon of soy sauce he rubs on is low-sodium and therefore doesn’t count). He stuffed the cavity with a fist-sized bundle of home-grown lemongrass with ginger and anise. These slim seasonings on store-bought poultry would be paltry. Fortunately, this bird did not come from Kroger or Walmart.
The day before, I slipped the seven-pound roaster into his fridge. I had called ahead, but he was already at the grocery store shopping for our Sunday Brunch. He listed off what was on the menu: brussels sprouts, eggs, discount bread, fruit for the grandbaby, and of course, pancake mix. I told him if he wanted to cook it, I had a whole chicken for our meal. It was locally raised, not pre-brined, and best of all, free!
“Where did you get it?” he asked, a little skeptical. I hoped my reply would impress him.
The experience of processing a chicken
Just before loading it into my car, I wrapped a twist tie around the plastic bag that had shrunken around the whole chicken. It was the final step in a process that had taken up most of my Saturday. Levi Burg, a Clark County Extension Agent, encouraged us to freeze or cook the raw meat as soon as possible while he dipped another chicken-filled bag into a steaming pot of water. He kept a watchful eye on the half-dozen of us who had shown up for his Poultry Processing workshop. As an extension agent, he ensured we followed food-safety protocols. As a lifelong farmer and hunter, he guided us through the hands-on workshop with confidence-building instruction.
In this last hour, my classmates and I hunched over individual cutting boards to practice our new skills. I spent most of my time at the parting-out station, finding a certain satisfaction in maneuvering around bone, cleaving off a perfect piece of thigh, or snapping a wing into flats and drumsticks. The woman next to me did not share my enthusiasm. A greenish grimace crossed her face every time I cracked apart the joints. She waved a hand for me to continue as she worked to overcome her squeamishness. This was practice, after all. The first chickens I parted out produced ragged-edged breasts with bite-sized chunks of meat still clinging to the ribcage. I removed the protruding bone broken from earlier mishandling and stripped off pinfeather-studded skin.
The work chilled my fingers. Salted ice water dripped onto our cutting boards as we sorted the birds. This one whole. This one parted out. This one spatchcocked. We inspected our earlier work, though it was impossible to know who had worked on which bird. They were submerged together in coolers filled with salt and ice water. Levi explained this was an essential step — to reduce contamination and to produce a more tender bird, the chickens needed to chill for over an hour.
It seemed odd to eat lunch during that hour. We crunched salty chips, sipped Ale‑8, and tore into cold-cut sandwiches. Most folks chose roast beef and avoided the turkey. We rested in the Extension Office’s teaching kitchen, grateful to be back inside, sheltered from the newly arrived autumn wind. The morning had been colder than any of us expected, and most of us wore only a sweater we didn’t mind dirtying.
In fact, the plastic aprons Levi provided were in the trash well before our lunch break. The wind kept whipping them around our torsos, proving to be more of a nuisance than helpful. The gloves were a different story—many kept at least one of the thick gloves on. They were designed to be “cut resistant” as we learned to use our tools properly, but their main advantage was keeping our hands warm from the cold air.
It was with my gloved hand that I grasped the limp, bloated neck of the chicken. With my other hand, the knife sliced cleanly through skin and muscle, slipping between vertebrae to sever the blood-filled neck from the meaty carcass. The neck joined the scaly feet in the trash. Before these appendages were removed, what lay before me had still felt like an animal. Its lifeless head flopped over the edge of the table.
I didn’t look into its eyes. Rather than reflecting on the circle of life, I focused on the task at hand—my ungloved hand inside the chicken’s body cavity. The organs were hot and slick. Using my index and middle fingers, I scraped out the lungs and pulled free the heart. Earlier, I had removed the crop, stomach, liver, and intestines as one connected mass. My greatest fear was tearing the intestines and spilling their contents onto the bird and workstation. Navigating by touch, I pressed the backs of my fingers against rigid bone, letting soft organs pass under my fingertips as I turned my wrist to sever connective tissue.
Though the work was visceral, I felt more confident using my hands than the knife. A reminder of my earlier misstep lingered a few feet away: a bright green stain on the white plastic table where I had nicked the gallbladder while separating it from the edible liver, spilling a thimbleful of bitter bile onto our workspace. With that mistake in mind, I worked carefully as I cut the cloaca free from the abdomen, mindful not to let the knife’s point pierce deeper into the organs within.
Of course, I couldn’t make the puncture until the bird was free of feathers. Our group plucked the birds by hand—a task requiring both fine dexterity and patience. Grasping pin feathers without tearing the skin proved nearly impossible while wearing gloves, so I discarded mine early on. I found the smaller feathers easier to handle, their removal warming my fingers against the chicken’s skin. The larger feathers, however, released cold water with every handful I pulled, and the mix of dampness and the autumn wind left my bare hands chilled to the bone.
The wind frustrated us all morning as it whipped around the building and disrupted our disassembly line. At one point, it blew water from the machine plucker onto its circuits, shorting it out. Even before that mishap, the wind carried away the heat from the propane burner beneath our scalding pot. Maintaining the water at the ideal temperature for the plucker was critical—it had to be just right. Too cool, and the plucker failed to work; too hot, and it tore through the chicken’s skin. And so, most of our birds emerged from the machine neither fully plucked nor skin wholly intact.
If the plucker had worked as intended, perhaps it would have been worth the lump it induced in my throat. It seemed the most disconnected part of the processing. A pair of birds tumbled quickly, loudly, and violently around a rubber-finger-lined barrel, while a bucket beneath the machine collected a pink slurry of water, feathers, and blood. Someone sprayed water from a hose into the open barrel from a few feet away, after another classmate flicked on the machine and ducked away. I avoided these tasks.
Instead, I chose to witness blood drain from the chickens. Graceful crimson lines arced from the birds’ bodies to the collection bucket and beyond, carried on the same gusts that chilled our hands. The blood drained slowly, relying on gravity rather than the rhythm of a beating heart, as the birds’ bodies relaxed.
Moments before, I had pulled my knife across their necks. It felt like a small kindness — a way to hurry them into stillness. I surprised myself at how calmly I pulled taught their skin, my glove cushioning their head to stop its swinging. It was clear that their skull wasn’t attached to the spine anymore, but I didn’t fully believe Levi’s assurances that they were already dead.
The chickens kicked, flapped, and moved their beaks. Each one was different—some went gently, others violently. Many stopped moving after a few moments; others thrashed for what felt like minutes. Tinny thumps echoed as feathers flailed against the galvanized steel cones that contained them. Two of these specially designed processing restraints were nailed into a two-by-four frame. As one chicken helplessly flexed its feet skyward, we fed another in, limp head dangling down, cradling its protesting wings into the second cone.
A mishap and a quick resolution
Levi had dispatched most of the chickens, and the rest of the group was content to focus on the more time-consuming tasks. Killing the birds was the quickest part of the process. Levi preferred “cervical dislocation,” a method that requires no tools and keeps both hands on the bird throughout. This approach helped avoid the very real possibility of chasing chickens with their heads cut off across the Extension Office parking lot. For the sake of animal welfare, Levi took on the task of dispatching well over half the chickens with deft skill.
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A few resolute participants still gave it a try. We were there to learn, and Levi understood that mistakes were part of the process. Many birds were dispatched quickly and cleanly. Others, however, were not so fortunate. One gentleman accidentally dislocated a bird’s head clean off, while a woman ripped open the neck skin without actually killing the bird.
That woman was me. Levi swiftly ended the misery I had unintentionally caused, lifting the bird from my hands with practiced ease before I could answer his question: “Did you feel it pop?” I had followed the instructions—widening my arms and twisting my wrist as directed. But panic set in—the kind from never having killed anything larger than a bug.
“I need help” bubbled out of me, as the pop I anticipated never came. Perhaps my hands weren’t positioned correctly—two fingers below her beak and a thumb at the base of her skull. Maybe I had placed my other hand too far down her leg, my arm span too short to complete the task. Whatever the reason, I had failed her.
She hadn’t squawked or flapped. Instead, she lay calmly in my hands, warm and heavy, her white, scraggly feathers puffed out against the cold. Levi had lifted her from the yellow plastic cages with barely a protest, choosing her at random from the flock.
I don’t know if she was the same hen that blinked up at me from the cages before the class began. None of the flock seemed distressed. They cooed and rustled, huddling together against the wind. These birds were accustomed to life outdoors. For most of their thirty-six days, they had lived in a pasture at Southern Songbird Farm, just ten miles away. They clucked and chirped as farmers Doug and Carrie Shepperson brought them fresh grain and new grass. Every day, they feasted against a backdrop of late-summer hills, their world earthy-green, bright and warm.
