Bleeding out chicken

I posted a similar topic in cooking, so sorry for any redundancy.

So we helped butcher chicken a month ago and one of the chickens wasn't properly bled out.  This is terrible. The person doing the killing put it in the kill cone and never slit its throat.  The chicken died (we hope) and then went in the scalder and the plucker machine.  The next person caught the mistake because the meat looked dark red.  We processed it anyway and were going to use it as bait (for skunk traps).  The chicken has been in the walk in freezer and has been stored properly. 

Does anyone know what would happen if we used this chicken for eating?  Everything I've read on butchery says you need to properly bleed animals.  The main reasons being it looks better, tastes better and lasts longer.  Does it taste bad if you don't or just not as good?  I'm leaning towards "when in doubt throw it out" as opposed to using it even just for stock and ruining it.  But anyone's experience or feed back would be helpful.

I don't personally see a problem with eating it.  It might taste different because of the presence of blood.  There's nothing wrong with eating blood (except some people think it's gross).

Alexia Allen of Hawthorn Farm is a wilderness skills instructor who also has a small farm in Woodinville, Washington.  I thought she did a really good job of demonstrating a respectful harvest of a chicken.

"I usually like wearing pink when I do my butchering.  It makes me the angel of death.  I have come to this process of killing animals with this sense of being almost a midwife?  Or at least when I teach people about butchering chickens I want to emphasize It's not about being brutal or macho, it's really about 'hey, you kill things and eat them.' That's part of how the world seems to work.  I didn't make up how the world works.  It just seems to be what needs to happen whether it is a chicken or a carrot.  It's just a vertabrate bias that might make a chicken seem different than a carrot."




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_S3P0eU0lE

I'm kind of confused how this chicken was killed unless entirely by the scalding and plucking machine. Also, how would it get moved from the killing cone to scalding without somebody noticing that it was a fully functioning chicken? Very large operation or just bad move on sombody's part?

Either way, let me know what blood red chicken meat tastes like. Just curious - joe

Joe,

I don't know how the chicken died.  The assumption was a heart attack in the kill cone, unlikely.  Or in the scald tank more likely.  It was not a big operation, depending on your definition of big.  We usually killed about 50 birds at a time.  It was definitely a bad move on the person's part.  He wasn't usually part of the operation.  As far as taste, I just made stock with the bird so I didn't directly try the meat.  We fed it to the dogs, which of course didn't care.

I just "saved" some chickens from a local farm that couldn't afford to feed them anymore...I brought my flock home, and within one hour, one of our dogs had a head in its mouth. (I will be putting smaller wire all along the chain-link fencing too...) Anyhow, I was at a complete loss as to what to do. It was my first day with my chickens! I took classes, read, read, read, but the "real deal" is a different thing... Thanks to your videos, photos, and reading posts, I was able to pluck, clean, and butcher the chicken. She is now in brine, and my clay roasting pot is soaking in the sink. I can't tell you how thankful I am to you! Without you, I would have been lost, and it would have been an even more unfair turn for the "rescued" chicken.

It is common nowadays in big industry. I remember when chicken tasted like chicken nowadays most store bought chicken tastes kinda FOUL. What's that black layer next to the  bone. Taste kind of spoiled.

Blood adds extra flavor, so it all depends on what you want it to taste like. Eating it isn't going to hurt you, but it does mean that the meat will taste different than your normally drained chicken. If you want a normal flavor, then don't eat it. If you're alright with the heightened, but different flavor, go for it!

matthew Rhoades wrote:It is common nowadays in big industry. I remember when chicken tasted like chicken nowadays most store bought chicken tastes kinda FOUL. What's that black layer next to the  bone. Taste kind of spoiled.

That black layer is cooked blood.  Industrial chickens are stunned usually by electric shock and then bled.  Often the stunning stops the heart, or weakens its pumping, so they don't bleed out nearly as thoroughly.

Would have been punnier if you'd said it tasted FOWL.

Some religions ban the eating of blood, or the meat from animals not properly exsanguinated.  Kosher and halal requirements state the animal cannot be stunned first for exactly this reason.  That way the heart is able to pump out the maximum amount of the blood.  To our modern western palates such meat (from poorly or not at all bled out animals) would taste inferior, but there are probably some cultures where that would be considered highly desirable, or at least not detrimental.