optium time post slaughter to freeze roasters

I thought I saw something on here about freezing the birds post slaughter too quickly makes the meat too tuff.

Any suggestions as to an optimum time to freeze?

Thanks!

Anne

I rested mine in the fridge for 24 hours but I have heard some people do it for 48 hours. I would be interested to hear more feedback about this as well.

Despite reading many times about people 'resting' their bird (as in rest in peace or would that be rest in pieces?) we have never done that.

We kill/pluck/clean and plunge the bird into a cold water bath. Keep changing the water as the body heat of the birds will heat it up. Keep it cold. I let mine sit for 20 - 40 minutes, depending on how long it takes me to get back to them, then set them out to drain. Then weigh, bag, write the weight on the bag and into the freezer.

There is no way that we have the cooling facilites to rest 25 - 40 birds overnight in a fridge. That might work if you only butcher one or two at a time.

A note to keep in mind is that chilling the bird in cold water, getting ALL the body heat out places less strain on your freezer. Putting warm bodies in your freezer puts a huge workload on it! As well, if possible, when putting birds in the freezer avoid clumping them in tight piles. Again, this means the innermost birds freeze way slower. It has always been my opinion that for safety's sake you want your meat to cool fast. So try to spread the birds around the freezer so cold air can circulate freely around them.

We do not rest or hang our birds and have always found them wonderful to eat. Never tough. But cooling them immediately and completely is something we insist on.

I agree with Uno that we cool them right away after they are cleaned, they get fresh water twice before they are cool enough. Occationally if butchering in the fall when nights are below 5 degree's we will keep them in the cool baths overnight then drain and bag. But that is more convenience for us than anything, we havent found any difference in the toughness of them.
It is very important they are cooled completely before draining and bagging though, not just freezer stress but food safety as well. There is a certain temperature they need to drop to quickly to avoid "bad stuff" growing on them. We have an industrial freezer that we use and they are flash froze in less than 4 hours, and usually 60 birds at a crack.

I have heard it is important to let the bird come out of rigor mortis prior to freezing. I will have to hunt down that info I can't remember where I heard it.
Along the same line I recall hearing that you don't want the bird to be to active prior to butchering as the lactic acid in the muscles cause toughness. Many like to use cones to prevent undue flapping around or running around. Again I would have to track down that info.

Yes the processor said today to wait 24 hours for them to come out of rigor. You can freeze them right away and then wait the extra time after you thaw them but it better to wait before. It would be the lactic acid that needs to be discarded.

Anne

We always did an ice water bath over night when we butchered our birds. It does mean a 2-3:00 am trip to the tub with ice to re-chill the water and freshen it also, but that is the way we have always done it. We usually started butchering our chickens approx 10 am and would finish around 5 pm at night, we would do approx 200 chickens and 30 or so turkeys, and a half dozen ducks/geese. We could have done it faster, but usually had the young kids catching the chickens so it took longer for butchering.

I am not saying anyone is wrong about this...but how does a dead body dispose of lactic acid? A dead chicken has NO system processes working, no liver, kidney or other purification system to filter out anything. Does the lactic acid just drift off into thin air?

I think a dead bird has to sit around dead for a certain period of time before rigor sets in. Our processing method ensures that plucking and gutting happens well before rigor occurs. By the time that bird might be stiffening up, we're popping it in the freezer.

HOWEVER,,the point of NOT panicking a bird prior to kill cannot be over emphasized. If you raise an animal with great care and skill but botch the slaughter, you can destroy all your hard work. I think this affects the carcass quality of larger animals even more. YOu want capture and slaughter to be as low key, quiet and easy as possible. That is why we make sure the person who enters the pen everyday to feed, is the person who enters the pen to catch for slaughter.

If you were processing large numbers of birds, this could be difficult. But to put 10-25 in the freezer, we make sure the feeder (someone familiar) is the person in the pen. THe birds still panic. But less so than if a total stranger entered the pen.

I think this discussion of when to freeze comes down to personal choice. As well, I think this idea of rigor mortis being a problem might be a left over from the days of dual purpose birds or the idea of hanging a pheasant by the neck until his head drops off and he falls out of the noose. Yum! Today's meat birds are designed to move through the slaughter process quickly and still turn out an edible SAFE product, which means fast chilling and fast freezing. No lounging around for rigor to come and go.

We have never concerned ourselves with rigor. We just get it done as fast, as cleanly and low key as possible. This topic might might apply more depending on the carcass quality of the bird; mature dual purpose versus young meat bird.

Well I dont know why everyone uses different method but the birds were vacumed sealed on packaging and chilled. They differently felt less stiff and had gone to the softer side of things the next day before we froze them.

Oh well.......

Found this helpful:

After consumers buy a poultry product, they relate the quality of that product to its texture and flavour when they are eating it. Whether or not poultry meat is tender depends upon the rate and extent of the chemical and physical changes occurring in the muscle as it becomes meat. When an animal dies, blood stops circulating, and there is no new supply of oxygen or nutrients to the muscles. Without oxygen and nutrients, muscles run out of energy, and they contract and become stiff. This stiffening is called rigor mortis. Eventually, muscles become soft again, which means that they are tender when cooked.

Anything that interferes with the formation of rigor mortis, or the softening process that follows it, will affect meat tenderness. For example, birds that struggle before or during slaughter cause their muscles to run out of energy quicker, and rigor mortis forms much faster than normal. The texture of these muscles tends to be tough because energy was reduced in the live bird. A similar pattern occurs when birds are exposed to environmental stress (hot or cold temperatures) before slaughter. High pre-slaughter stunning, high scalding temperatures, longer scalding times and machine picking can also cause poultry meat to be tough.

Tenderness of portioned or boneless cuts of poultry is influenced by the time post-mortem of the deboning. Muscles that are deboned during early postmortem still have energy available for contraction. When these muscles are removed from the carcass, they contract and become tough.

To avoid this toughening, meat is usually 'aged' for 6 to 24 hours before deboning. However, this is costly for the processor.

When poultry is deboned early (0 to 2 hours post-mortem), 50 to 80 per cent of the meat will be tough (Figure 2). On the other hand, if the processor waits 6 hours before deboning, 70 to 80 per cent of the poultry meat will be tender.

The poultry industry has recently started using post-slaughter electrical stimulation immediately after death to hasten rigor development of carcasses and reduce 'aging' time before deboning. This is different from energy depletion in the live bird, which causes meat to be tough. When electricity is applied to the dead bird, the treatment acts like a nerve impulse, and causes the muscle to contract, use up energy and enter rigor mortis at a faster rate.

In the live bird, the same treatment causes meat to be tough but after death, the treatment causes tender deboned poultry meat within two hours post-mortem instead of the four to six hours required with normal aging.

Although electrical stimulation is still in the developmental stages, it seems that processors using it can debone carcasses right out of the chiller and save on their equipment costs, time, space and energy requirements.

uno wrote:I am not saying anyone is wrong about this...but how does a dead body dispose of lactic acid? A dead chicken has NO system processes working, no liver, kidney or other purification system to filter out anything. Does the lactic acid just drift off into thin air?

Rigor sets in because of chemical reaction in muscles.. they are dumping out myosin, I think, and there is nothing to pick it back up as no more electrical stimulation or the brain receiving signals.

During rigor mortis, another process called autolysis takes place. This is the self-digestion of the body's cells. The walls of the cells give way, and their contents flow out. Rigor mortis ends not because the muscles relax, but because autolysis takes over.

We certainly have had tough birds because we didn't let them sit long enough and froze them in rigor. This year's they sat in ice water for probably 4-5 hours, then the freezer. Nice a tender not squishy but not tough either.

My sister worked at a chicken processing facility and once chickens were plucked and clean they got a blast of liquid nitrogen and then hung for some period of time.

I would be hard pressed to think a commerical enterprise would do anything that was costing them money if they didn't need to.

Perhaps all you have to do is get them cold enough rather than really having to rest them for 24 hours.

My 2 cents worth.