Bulk Chicken

I tried a new thing this summer - bulk chicken!

I hate to buy meat at the grocery store. It's full of dilemmas. I know the organic, range-fed is best, but do I want to sacrifice that much of my grocery budget on meat that will only feed us for one meal? Or should I settle for the cheaper meat that I know isn't as good for us? How fresh is this? How were the animals who provided it fed? How fresh is this meat? Etc, etc. Frankly, it's exhausting.

We have now twice bought a quarter of a cow. It was a lot of money up front, but we had roasts, steaks, and ground beef in the freezer. It was nice. However, what we found was that we don't eat much ground beef. Tacos is really the only thing we eat on a semi-regular basis that requires ground beef. What we REALLY needed was a freezer full of chicken. I use whole chickens for almost everything, but sometimes I do have to buy chicken breasts at the store. It would be really nice to have lots of those on hand.

So when a friend posted about Zaycon on Facebook, I was interested. I read that I could get 40 lbs of hormone-free, range fed minimally processed chicken breasts for $60. That sounded like a pretty good deal. So I ordered.

"Pick up" was Thursday, June 4th. I received an email reminder the week before and a text message the morning of, reminding me that my pickup time was scheduled for 12:30-1 PM. I also got a text at about 12:15 saying the driver was early. So I headed over to the pickup location...a bowling alley near my house. Strange, but, okay.

Zaycon IMMEDIATELY scored points because I DID NOT HAVE TO GET OUT OF MY CAR. You can see the truck and the line of cars in the picture above. I waited in line, the guy checked my name on a clipboard, and I got my chicken!

I got home, put the kids down for naps, and immediately got ready to start trimming. I lysoled every surface, washed my hands really well, and set to work. There were 16 of these "butterflies" as they are called. I don't know if you can appreciate the size from this picture, but they were SO BIG!

I had watched several Youtube videos on the best ways to trim and divide chicken, so I decided to divide the breasts into cutlets, tenderloins, and breasts. Most of the time, after I had the cutlet and tenderloin separated, I had to cut the breast in half because they were so big! It took me an hour and a half, but by the time I was done, I had 56 breasts, a gallon bag of tenderloins, 2 gallon bags of cutlets, and a quart bag of cuts perfect for chicken fried chicken (which is one of Rick's favorite meals). Throughout the next few days I made up several freezer meals for friends having babies and some for us to just have in the freezer.

We have grilled several times and really enjoyed this delicious chicken. I think this is something I'll definitely be doing again! If you are interested, click here. If you order, I get $5 off my next order! :)