the slaughter of the innocent: a step by step guide to butchering a chicken

here is a step by step guide to butchering a chicken, with pictures and commentary. we start with a real live chicken:



and end up with a very tasty adobo:



but first, a warning: there will be blood. and death. and various innards. if you are squeamish, or, if you plan to eat a few moments from now, or, if you have just eaten, i suggest you come back a bit later when your food is safely digesting deep inside your gut so you don't blame me for a good lunch wasted...

.
.
.

ready?

.
.
.

one day, on a trip i made to negros oriental a few months ago, my host pastor jonathan told me that he was going to slaughter a chicken for lunch. the news instantly piqued my curiosity. i am a city dweller. and as such, i am happily removed from certain facts regarding the production of food, the slaughter and preparation of chicken being one of them.

this has its advantages, of course. imagine the stress, and mess, of having to slaughter a chicken everytime you feel like eating, say, chicken curry. also, if people were more involved in the process, i bet kfc would no longer be so happy looking at its sales figures. whole industries actually thrive on that removal. people's livelihoods are at stake.

but that also has its disadvantages. we don't know what health risks we are exposing ourselves to eating chickens raised on a diet of hormones and antibiotics. come to think of it, i'm not even sure if what they sell at kfc actually is chicken... but that is another story...

anyhow (w/c sounds very close to 'inihaw'...), i found the idea of seeing the whole process of turning one of them feathery critters into lunch quite novel. so i took out my camera and followed it through.

introducing to you dear readers our unlucky specimen. he/it (depending on your point of view) was a cohort of that gang of chickens roaming around my host's backyard, terrorizing the local population of bugs and worms. and when we die, the bugs and worms eat us... ahh, sweet justice, don't you think?



naively, i asked joshua, pastor jonathan's son and pictured above holding the chicken, 'gihinganlan ni ninyong manoka?' (have you given this chicken a name?) at which point, he gave me this blank look, as if the act of naming a chicken was the most bizarre thing to do. which makes sense, really.

you wouldn't want to form any sort of emotional connection to creatures that would some day end up at the dinner table. and naming chickens like they were your pets is evidence of that emotional connection. which also made me realize how truly far apart the realities are of life in the city and life in the countryside.

i still remember seeing one of my childhood friends cry over a chicken. his parents had brought some alive from their home town, to fatten up. and they gave my friend the task of feeding them everyday. naturally, a bond was formed between pet and master. but the day of reckoning soon came. my friend watched as his older brother slit his beloved chicken's throat, and the tears flowed from his eyes as freely as the blood that drained out from the chicken's body. he mourned the death of, what had been to him, a friend. in his dear pet's memory, he drew with the chicken's blood a cross on his forehead.

but to these kids, our unnamed chicken is lunch, and nothing else. joshua seems to be licking his lips in anticipation, and mico (the boy in the polo shirt, a neighbor) seems to be looking forward to some chicken feet adobo. even the bird appears to have accepted its fate.



the whole process can essentially be condensed to the following steps: kill, bleed, scald, pluck, gut, chop, cook. interestingly, all of them are single syllable verbs, as if the words pertaining to survival only required simple words, simple ideas, simple choices... eat or starve, live or die...

having chosen our chicken, we head to the back, taking with us a sharp knife.







make sure you have someone hold the chicken by the feet and the wings. the last thing we want is to have a headless chicken flapping and running around, with its blood splashing all over the crime scene. i've read somewhere that chickens have two central nervous systems and it takes a while for the bird to stop moving after death, thus all those headless chicken metaphors. the lesser the evidence, the better.





with one hand, hold the chicken’s head by its comb and, with the knife in your other hand, slice into the bird's neck to sever the jugular veins and arteries. thus the idiom about "going for the jugular," commonly used by basketball analysts when the winning team is in the act of finishing off the losing team, therefore comparing the losers to dead chickens. chicken butchering has not only given humanity the gift of food, but has its gifts to language as well.







you know that you’ve succeeded in cutting the jugular because the blood will flow out fast and freely. just hold on to the bird and let the heart pump the blood out of its body. oh irony of ironies.





if the blood stops flowing, you can try to cut the neck again in case there are arteries/veins left intact.





i think we may also have cut through the bird's air passages here, thus the bubbles.



make sure your grip on the dying bird is firm, as it will occasionally thrash about with what strength it has left.



the bird shook for one last time, and the blood on its neck stopped bubbling. a few moments later, the dripping blood ceased. the bird was now dead. may its soul (or what chickens have for a soul) rest in peace.



it sure ain’t pretty, but this is the reality of butchering chickens.



we then head to the kitchen where we had prepared beforehand a wok in which we boiled some water.





this is the scalding stage, where we immerse the now dead chicken in hot water. the purpose, aside from killing the bird again so there are no doubts that it is dead, is also to soften the skin's hold on the feathers. scalding opens the feather shafts so they're much easier to pluck later on.







it is very important that you turn the whole bird over and over in the boiling water, and that no part of the bird be left unscalded. the story of achilles is a good cautionary tale for this. his mother thetis was not very thorough when she dipped achilles in the river styx, thus his legendary heel. though i doubt that carelessness in this stage of the process would not lead to a fate as catastropic as achilles's, it would be preferable to spare ourselves from the wrath of diners who discover unplucked feathers on their chicken adobo, no?











now, the plucking stage. we head back to the crime scene and pluck the feathers out. if you have properly scalded the chicken, then this should be easier. there IS a machine for plucking, but since we don't have that, we do it manually :)









question: why do we call butchered chickens as "dressed" chickens? since we are now at the plucking stage, it seems to me that we were more like undressing the chicken than dressing it, no?









notice the small black spots underneath the skin on the chicken's leg. those are tiny feathers that you won't be able to pluck out by hand. we will deal with them later.











i think one thing that makes the typical dressed chicken sold in supermarkets so much easier to deal with is the fact that they are all headless. we do not see their faces. if we do, it's possible that we start regarding them as individuals... looking into the chickens' eyes, we might imagine the lives they've led, the adventures they've had, the hens and chicks they've played around with, the worms and bugs they've terrorized... which will then make us think twice about buying that chicken... ok, now i get it.







now that we've plucked out all the feathers we can pluck, we go back to the kitchen. we put aside the wok where we had scalded the chicken earlier, put the chicken to the fire, and burn off the small feathers left underneath the skin.









after that we rinse the bird in warm water, and brush away any remaining feathers.







you can also use a knife to work at the more stubborn feathers. these probably weren't scalded enough.







now, we dismantle the chicken. here we see pastor jonathan ripping the bird with his bare hands, with one hand holding on to the backbone and another near the chicken's back end, then pulling it apart. a bit primitive, very brute force, but it works. and it will be easier to gut this way, than if the chicken were still whole.





here we see the chicken split into 2, with first section having the backbone, ribs, and legs together, and the second having the breast part and wings together. most of the innards are with the second section.



to gut, just scoop as much of the innards as you can with your hand, so you are grasping a good handful of guts. then, pull it out slow and steady. and make sure you don't squish the innards in your hand, ESPECIALLY the large intestines, for obvious reasons.





observing the chicken's dismantling, i had a quick refresher on basic anatomy, something i had not done since i disected a frog in high school biology class. these are the small intestines. it can be made into a tasty barbecue.



on his right hand here is the liver, and on the left, correct me if i'm wrong, is what looks like a kidney



laid out here at the bottom of the picture is the liver, and attached to it is the heart. then above it is the gizzard, or batikon, my favorite chicken innard. then to the right is the kidney. except for the kidney, they are all edible.



the spongy red thing here are the lungs, and the yellow pea sized thing is the gall bladder. you can simply scoop out the lungs with your fingers. but the gall bladder you have to be careful with. make sure you don't break it and release the bile inside it.



once you take out all the innards, you can now start chopping.









gather all the chopped chicken parts and the edible innards into a container and wash them.





we are now ready to cook!



ate virgie, pictured here, then took over. it is almost miraculous what a little application of heat, with the addition of some oil, garlic, vinegar, soy sauce, can do to chicken...



some of the creatures hoping for their share



and here is the fruit of about an hour and a half of our labors: chicken adobo.



after seeing all that carnage, some of you might now be considering turning vegetarian. if you do, i can only wish you and your vegetables well. the chicken was too darn tasty.

photos taken on my trip to basay, negros oriental, january 2010.