I put it off and put it off and put it off, but eventually the time came to try our hands once again at killing (and plucking) ducks.  By waiting so long, I hoped that all of the ducks would be done molting (which was true for two of the three ducks we processed this week).  Plus, once September hits, the garden year is starting to wind down (although there's still plenty to do), so stealing a morning for poultry butchering seems more feasible.

You may recall that, last time around, I ended up skinning our duck rather than plucking.  Since then, I accumulated some tips from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous, the most important of which was --- try heating the scalding water all the way to boiling rather than stopping at the recommended temperature.  Sure enough, boiling water (and lack of pin feathers) changed duck plucking from utterly impossible to merely tedious.  We included a generous squirt of dish fluid in the water, roughed up the duck's feathers while dunking the duck, and then let the duck sit for several minutes in the hot liquid.  This was still insufficient to allow us to use a power plucker to remove feathers, but we did manage to kill, pluck, and dress that duck in 45 man-minutes --- not great by chicken standards, but feasible.

When the time came to move to duck two, though, I decided to try dry plucking.  Damp down quickly coated my fingers while plucking duck one, and the down was much more annoying to work around than wet chicken feathers.  So I pulled out handfuls of down before dunking the duck and found that the down was much more pleasant (if no faster) to remove when dry.  (This method would also have allowed me to save the down for stuffing, although I was too focused on experimenting with plucking techniques to do so this time around.)  The wing and tail feathers were too tough to remove dry, though, so I dunked the dunk in the boiling water before moving on to these larger feathers.  The result was a duck processed in 50 man-minutes, but resulting in a much cleaner carcass than I managed with duck one.

Duck three was the one with pin feathers, and I don't want to write about that pain and suffering here.  Ack!  I survived (and the duck, obviously, didn't).

Anyway, to cut a long story short, my conclusion is --- dry plucking is a little slower than wet plucking but is much more pleasant.  And, whatever it takes, wait until those ducks stop molting before butchering!