How To Process a Duck: Pt.5 Fine-tuning and Storage.
Fine tuning and Storage
Feather time is super important for plucking the feathers, but how well you timed the feathers is really magnified when you get to this phase. Fine-tuning the breasts and legs can either break you or be quite effortless. If you have processed your birds at a stage of feather development where there are lots of pin feathers, you will suffer. Suffer is the correct word. I have made this mistake before. In my first season I mis-timed my second group of 4 birds. They were full of pin feathers. I was new to processing at the time and everything had gone well with the first two birds I did, so a week later I decided to do another 4. Just one week later, I was too late. These 4 birds became an arduous task when it came to fine tuning, but I was not going to give up. I worked through the tedious task of working my way through breasts and legs that were riddled with pin feathers. My hands and forearms were absolutely fried from the sheer volume of tweezer work. Stubborn pin feathers do not usually come out with the first pull. My first year of raising and processing ducks was full of many mistakes I only made once. This was a mistake that I did not ever want to make again.
However, when you get the feather timing right, it can work out just like in the video. If I hadn’t been talking to the camera, it wouldn’t have taken more than 5 minutes to go over the breasts and legs to make them restaurant ready. This can be easy work.
Set up with a pair of fish boning tweezers and a bowl of cool water. I refrigerate the breasts and legs for 24-48 hours after butchering before I do any fine-tuning. This makes the skin extra cold, so there is no risk of tearing the skin. I find that it is also easier to pull any pin feather from cold skin. Some pin feathers pull out easily when pulled in the direction that they grow. If they fight you, try pulling them in the opposite direction that they grow. Pull a pin feather, rinse it off your tweezers in the bowl of water. Repeat this process until the breasts and legs are clean. The breasts are always easier than the legs. The breasts get good exposure to the plucking fingers of the machine. The Fowl Plucker does a good job on the legs but there are always going to be just a bit more stray feathers on the legs. When I am fine-tuning the legs, I like to work in quadrants. I will start in one section and finish that section before moving on, to the next spot. This will help you feel like you are making progress. If you jump all around the leg randomly pulling pin feathers, you will feel like you are going nowhere. For the breast a systematic approach can also be helpful. Start at the tip and work your way back to the thicker part of the breast.
Cryovac
After all of the pin feathers have been removed, cryovac each leg and breast individually. Label the packages with the date and freeze them. Cryovac removes all of the air from the bag and makes your meat stable in the freezer for 1-2 years. I have never gotten past a year, even when 68 breasts and 68 legs have gone in the freezer. Packing the breasts and legs in individual packages helps to minimize the space they take up in the freezer and they defrost quickly. Individual packs also give you control of how many you want to take out. One year I made the mistake of packing legs in 4-packs. This put me in a position of needing to take out more than I wanted to on a few occasions. Single packs are best. The females are much smaller than the males. Sometimes you need more than one leg from a female to make a meal.
