Something from "nothing"... why we can thrive on almost zero income
Folks... wasn't sure which forum to put this in... kitchen or this one. Anyway...
We raise pastured meat chickens for sale (and our own use, of course). I cut them up and freeze the pieces individually, before packing them into heavy freezer bags. That way, I can use far fewer bags, and people can take out as many or as few pieces as they need for any particular meal. This includes boning out the breasts.
We did 50 birds Wednesday. When I finally got done with the deboning of the breasts (and pulling the tendons from the fillets), I had two 24 quart kettles full of bones, skins and small bits of waste meat. The buyers of this particular batch wanted the necks and backs to make broth with (you'd be amazed at how many people don't... doesn't matter they paid good money for the whole bird... nope, they don't have a clue what to do with them, so they let us keep them!)
Because I cut pretty close when deboning the breasts, what's left doesn't look like much more than bare bone.
Ha!
I cooked them down overnight, and by morning, all the bones were able to be broken into mush by hand. This is the advantage of really young birds (these were 7 weeks and dressed out on average 5.7 pounds each)... older birds have much tougher bone and you've got to be a lot more careful.
Today, I packed all the solids into jars... bones and all. Added enough broth to cover, and the jars are now in my canners being processed.
End results were 30 pints of high quality dog food, plus another 14 quarts of chicken broth for our own cooking needs.
Almost everyone I know would have tossed those "empty" bones into the compost.
The next two batches (50 and 35 birds) will also include the necks and backs, which should double (or more) the final tally. A cupful of this stuff is easily equal to 2 cups of even a good quality dog food... If I add 2 cups of cooked rice to a pint of this stuff, it will feed all four working dogs for a day.
Yes, it takes time. And if you're making $50 an hour at your day job, it probably isn't worth it... although I don't know how you compare pure organic canned chicken to any commercially available dog food. But if you're going to be home anyway, it's a heck of a lot more profitable than watching TV!
Summerthyme
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Originally Posted by Summerthyme
