Kashering Poultry

Poultry presents a problem beef does not: the bird arrives covered in feathers, and the easiest way to remove them is hot water. But the bird has not yet been salted, and heat before salting cooks the blood in place.

Almost every rule here follows from that one conflict.

Feathers come off first

Salting is done after plucking. Salting over the feathers does not work — the feathers block the salt from acting on the flesh.

Which sets up the real question: how do you get the feathers off without heat?

Scalding and pouring: forbidden before kashering

• Scalding the birds in boiling water to loosen the feathers is forbidden before salting. Bedieved, where it was done in a kli sheini — water poured off from the pot that was on the fire into a second vessel — it is permitted; lechatchila it is not, and the vessel needs hagalah.
• Pouring boiling water from a kli rishon onto the bird forbids it to the depth of a peel. The remedy is to peel off the skin and discard it, and the bird is permitted.
• Very cold water before plucking is also to be avoided — soaking is partly meant to soften the meat, and cold water hardens it.
• Chemical plucking agents should be avoided where they might impede the blood's release from the flesh.

The 42°C ceiling

Machine plucking with hot water is forbidden for the same reason as hand scalding: the birds are unkashered, and hot water cooks them before salting. Birds plucked in a machine running on boiling water are forbidden by that.

There is, however, a narrow working allowance, and it is the detail that matters to anyone running a line. Some permit machine plucking where the water is kept below 42°C — and only under that condition may the machine be used at all.

Two conditions come attached, and both are demanding:

1. Continuous supervision throughout the whole time the birds are in the water, verifying the temperature never rises above 42°C. Not a spot check — the whole immersion.
2. The machine and vessels must first be kashered by hagalah, since they were previously run at boiling temperatures above yad soledes bo.

It is worth seeing why this is a supervision requirement rather than an equipment setting. A scalder that drifts ten degrees for twenty minutes has forbidden everything that passed through it, and nothing downstream reveals that it happened. That is exactly the kind of process where a reading has to be watched rather than trusted — see process parameters that leave no trace.

Singeing the remaining down

After the large feathers are plucked, the small feathers and hairs are commonly singed off. The instructions are specific:

• Use a small, light flame — paper or straw.
• Keep the bird moving back and forth over it. Holding it still in one place heats that spot, and heating it cooks the blood there and forbids the bird.

Lechatchila, the place of shechita on the neck should be rinsed first, any visible blood on the bird washed off before singeing, and the sinews in the jaw cut. Bedieved, where the shechita site was not rinsed and the sinews were not removed, the bird is not forbidden — the place of the blood is removed or peeled away.

Where the order was reversed

One should not plan to salt the hen over its feathers in order to scald it afterwards. But where the scalding happened after the salting was complete, one may be lenient bedieved — even where it was scalded in a kli rishon.

Which is consistent with everything above: once the blood has been drawn out by salting, heat is no longer the problem it was five minutes earlier.

For what precedes all of this, see what shechita involves. Questions about a particular bird go to your rav.