Back at the farm today :)
It was really cold and snowing! All the turkeys are weighed, boxed up, and labelled to allocate it to a customer then put in the fridges in alphabetical order. The customers come with their ticket and we get the turkey.
Quite a bit of waiting around for people so we got some turkey feed bags, filled them with straw and went up one of the fields and went sledging!
There were 7 of us there in the end and we all got soaked and really cold!
Been back at the turkey farm today, was good to be back :)
It was really cold, it felt colder outside than in the fridges!
I started off de-pinning them, they have little black feather stubs where the feathers grow through the skin, they cook out and aren't a problem but they don't look very good so customers don't really like them.
I was talking to John about waxing ... they have a big metal tank which you pump hot water through the outside, you buy big blocks of wax which melt inside it then you dip the bird in, leave it to cool and peel it off with the stubs and feathers coming away in the wax, then that wax is re-heated and strained/sieved before using again.
They've only used it a couple of times with the turkeys because its expensive and time consuming if you're only doing a few birds ... its better used for the geese they have and apparently works well. Apparently Kelly's (the big turkey farmers) are starting to use it more, recently.
I had to go and get all the turkeys out of the fridges on the racks, bring them in, hang them up and pin them. Chop their heads off with these huge scissors to break the neck, then cut the skin with a knife ... that goes in the bin to be incinerated. When they're pinned you cut their legs off but have to bang them and pull to get the ligaments out.
After that they go to the next person to be dressed ...
