Today was the day to butcher our turkeys for Thanksgiving!! We have been waiting since April for this day! This entire week the weather has been saying that it was going to be COLD & RAINY today. We woke up and it was BEAUTIFUL!!! Cold but beautiful!! When I went out at 9:00 to start getting everything ready and there was ice on everything. BRRR!! We started setting up. Julia built a fire in the drive way with some cinder blocks around to keep it contained. I started getting everything else ready. I ran to the store and got some ice (and a soda) and when I got back everything was ready to go.
Once the fire was going we stacked up the cinder blocks and put a couple of fence posts across and the kamado grate on top, and then a metal trashcan on that. We filled the trashcan up with water and our scalder was ready to go!! Here’s Julia filling up the trash “scalder”.
My job was to go get the turkeys, and then Julia helped me do the “deed”. Here are a couple of pictures of our tom! HE WAS HUGE!!!!
We weighed each bird before hand, here are their weights:
Hen 1: 30 Pounds
Hen 2: 34 Pounds
Hen 3: 30 Pounds
Tom: 47 Pounds!!! WOW!!
We let them bleed out, took them all over and then scalded them. We then started plucking them, and with a nice scald, they plucked very easily!! I do have to say that eviscerating a turkey is a little bit harder than a chicken. I would have thought that doing a turkey with it’s size would have been easier but everything seemed to be more attached than in a chicken.
We gave one of the turkeys to Becca’s (Julia’s sister) family, one we will be putting in a brine this week for Thursday, we’ll probably do the tom, and then 2 of them we are going to can. Julia has already started the canning process!! He you can see one of the hens cooking.
We did weigh the tom after we were done and he was around 40 pounds!! Now that’s one big turkey!! The hens are right around 21 pounds.
We did everything from starting to set up to finishing in just 3.5 hours. Not bad for our first time processing turkeys.
