Bird Cleaning

S

Scott

New member
How do most of you clean your birds - Breast Only or Full cleaning (like a store bought)

I just breast them out but I think it limits the cooking options.
 
Depends onthe bird & the amount of holes. Most get breasted out. Cans, redheads, pintails & gadwalls with no or just one or two pellets in the body get skinned, brined, covered with bacon & roasted. Every once in a while I will get ambitious and pluck a couple but that is very rare.

If you've never brined birds before roasting, you've got to try it. Go to FoodNetwork.com and get Alton Brown's brine recipe. Modify it to fit you taste. I brine mine overnight & then roast. It is great. I did a turkey like this two years ago and it was incredible, best roasted turkey I have ever had!
 
99% of the time mine get breasted. Mostly because I'm lazy and don't take the time to do the whole bird. I DON"T feel any guilt about the amount of meat lost, but like you, I think it limits my recipe options.
 
Ditto here. 9.99999 get breasted out. Similar to Huntindave, I'm lazy and am limited in cooking options.

Hunt Safe.
Ryan
 
I pluck any duck that qualifies: no pinfeathers, fat, not too shot up. I probably pluck 20 - 30 birds and breast the rest. I love a good roast goose too, but they take me 20 min to pluck so I only do a few.

I'll have to try that brine idea.

If you get a bunch of birds, like 20 lbs of breast fillets, try making summer suasage. It's pretty good.

Mike
 
I always breast them out. I even started making the wife buy turkey breast since no one in the family seems to eat the drumsticks. Do the same with pheasant.
 
I'm with Mike, I pluck on appropriate birds. No shot, lotsa fat, no pin feathers. So I would say that I breast about 50% of my birds. Maybe more due to laziness.
 
Basically, it is a brine with salt, brown sugar, garlic cloves, bay leaves, peppercorns, and other spices. You heat (not boil) some water & dissolve the salt & sugar. Add spices. Then add more water to get you volume and cool it down. Then chill the brine in the fridge until cold (very important if you dislike food poisoning). ONce it is cold, add the birds & brine into a ziplock, get all the air out & chill overnight.
I used Alton Browns recipe as a base and modifyed it. There are other brine recipes on Food Networks website as well.
Enjoy!
 
I probably pluck about 50%, sometimes more. I like roast duck and they almost have to be plucked to be good. I have wrapped bacon around skinned birds but skinning can take as much time as plucking. Ones the have shot up legs or are full of pin feathers are breasted. Geese are plucked if there are not a lot of pin feathers and I always save the legs even if I breast them. Check your regs, some states mandate you save all the meat you can off of bigger birds.

Tim
 
Like a good number of you I breast out most of my birds. Some really nice birds I will pluck for a really nice dinner. With all the birds I will put them in a plastic freezer bag and let them age for five days on the bottom tray of the refrigerator. Here in Chapel Hill, the ladies would make obcene jestures at my house if I hung them in the shade of a tree. Same with the leg and thigh meat which I will use to make a pate'. Gizzards are cleaned and cooked for the dogs, livers saved for the pate'. Oh, yes, depending on the bird, certainly feathers, and on occassion whole skins saved for fly tying friends. Will try the brine. Good eating to all, R.Bell
 
This is from Food Network (Alton Brown's Good Eats show. If you don't watch this, you need to. The most informative cooking show on TV and it's fun to watch as well.) http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_8389,00.html

Keep in mind that this is for a whole turkey and makes 2 gallons of brine. For 2 ducks ducks, I cut the recipe by 3/4 and use only 3 cups of water and 1 cup of chicken or beef stock made from 1 bullion cube. Then I put the ducks & brine in a quart zippy lock bag. You'll loose some brine getting the air out, that is OK. I brine for 24 hours in the fridge, you can do more or less. One good trick is to freeze the birds in the brine, they marinate as you thaw!
I leave out the ginger and add other seasonings, such as bay leaf, oregano, etc.. Experiment, thats the fun part of cooking. I cover mine with bacon & then roast. It is quite tasty. Should work on any game birds, chickens, etc..

Brine for 1 Turkey:
1 cup kosher salt
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 gallon vegetable stock
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
1/2 tablespoon allspice berries
1/2 tablespoon candied ginger
1 gallon iced water

Combine all brine ingredients, except ice water, in a stockpot, and bring to a boil. Stir to dissolve solids, then remove from heat, cool to room temperature, and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled.
Early on the day of cooking, (or late the night before) combine the brine and ice water in a clean 5-gallon bucket. Place thawed turkey breast side down in brine, cover, and refrigerate or set in cool area (like a basement) for 6 hours. Turn turkey over once, half way through brining.
 
Thanks Carl for that brining recipie, I saved that one. Like most here I breast out my ducks partially due to laziness, but also due to family demand. My wife and kids absolutely LOVE to eat ducks and breasting them out makes them much more forgiving to cook. We flash fry them (divers included) medium RARE in a hot pan with olive oil, fresh garlic and dusted with seasoned bread crumbs and our gang reaches for them like it's pizza and their starving! IMO cooking a whole duck is extremely unforgiving takes a master chef to avoid "gaminess". I've got a friend who has hunters parties around the process of hot waxing off the feathers and ending up with the finest looking whole birds you will ever see. However, cooking them so they taste truly outstanding is an entirely different matter. Whole ducks frequently come out tough and strong tasting.

John O Carter has an interesting chapter in his famous waterfowl book about charcoaling whole ducks on a rotisserie that I have yet to, but am about to try......
 
When you cook a whole bird, how do you get the shot out..and even more imprtant to me..what about the feathers and down stuffed in the BB hole? I de-bone all my game, slice it up and hold it up to light to make sure no one crunches a bb or gets a tuft of feathers or fur in their mouth..don't really care if they do..just can't stand it myself.
 
I am choosy about which birds I do this with. I pick ones with no shot in the body or maybe just one or two. Then I pick the feathers out of the hole with tweezers and try to fish the shot out. Sometimes I just find them when carving. If a bird is pretty shot up, it gets breasted & deboned. I've chipped a tooth on steel shot and it sucks.

One not, I don't just brine whole birds, I will take the whole breast off (bone-in) and brine/roast them as well.

If I would head shoot all my birds, it would make things easier. But with my tendancy to stop my swing, body & butt shots are the norm!
 
Depends on the bird and shot count, but usually for puddle ducks and cans I'll pluck the breast and cut the back out. I like to cook ducks with the skin on. Buffleheads, bluebills, redheads I'll breast out.
 
I breast out 100%, used to save the legs, and make soup, but didn't for some reason this year.

To you guys that pluck, are you pulling out dry feather or dunking them in hot water? Growing up we used to butcher 500 chickens a year for/and with all the relatives, tried plucking ducks a couple of times, never seems to go as good, tried dunking them and then wrapping them in a towel, tried dunking them in wax, just never seems to go that well.
 
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