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Here's How
To Shrink-Bag A Chicken...

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sealed end view of a shrink-bagged chicken
If you have never shrink-bagged a chicken, it’s about time you learned. The following step-by-step photo tutorial shows exactly how it’s done. The same process applies to shrink-bagging larger birds.

First, you will need a big pot of clean hot water to dunk the bagged chicken into. A propane-fueled turkey deep-fryer, like shown in the picture below will do the job just fine.  

If you happen to have a thermostatically controlled Whizbang Chicken Scalder, you can clean and disinfect it after processing your birds, then refill with clean water, reset the temperature controls (proper temperature is discussed next), and use that for shrink-bagging your chickens.


The manufacturer of our shrink-bags recommends a water temperature of 180 degrees. I have successfully shrink-bagged birds at 190 to 200 degrees.


After processing your birds and cooling them down in some sort of cold-water chill tank, excess water must be drained off the bird and out of the body cavity. The picture below shows a batch of chickens draining on a homemade PVC drain rack.


In the next picture you can better see how the PVC rack is put together. This particular rack was made by Lewis Rave, of Jasper, Minnesota.


Once your chicken is sufficiently chilled and drip-dry, put it into the bag head-end first. You can, of course, also just put the bags over the chicken while they are propped up on the drain rack, as shown in the picture before last.


Bunch the open end of the bag together down tight to the chicken and twist the bag around several times as shown in the next picture. It is important to note that a chicken goes into a bag easier when it is past the stiff (rigor mortis) stage of its afterlife—a stiff bird does not compress and bag as well as a flexible bird.


Some people use metal hog rings to secure the twisted bag. Hog rings work real well, but you need special pliers to crimp the rings. Another option is to use inexpensive 4” plastic “zip ties” as shown in this picture.


You can use a pair of pliers to get a grip on the zip tie and pull it tight...


This next picture shows the chicken all bagged and zip-tied


Once bagged and zip-tied the bird is NOT yet ready to dunk in the hot water. There is one more very important thing that needs to be done. The bag must be pierced to create a vent hole. 

Without this vent hole, air in the bag will not be able to escape as the bag shrinks tight to the chicken. Without a vent hole, you will end up with something like a chicken in a bubble, and you don’t want that.

A pin hole is not sufficient for proper venting. You need a slice about 3/8” long. A little bit less or a little bit more is okay. In the following picture I’m making the slice with a Chicago Cutlery 7” boning knife, which happens to be my favorite chicken butchering knife.

Some people employ an inexpensive, disposable wallpapering knife with the break-off tips to pierce the bag. These knives are available with a 3/8” wide blade, so you get a perfect vent slice every time.

Where you pierce the bag is important. I suggest you pierce it in the center of the breast, as shown in the picture below.


Now it’s shrink time! 

In the picture below, I am about to dunk the chicken down into the hot water. Those insulated rubber gloves are real handy around hot water. I use them for scalding chickens prior to plucking and they are kind of grimy. A cleaner pair just for shrink-bagging would be a good idea. The reason you might want to use insulated gloves is that the hot water tends to bubble up some as a bag is lowered in and air is forced out the vent hole. Be careful!

Lower the bagged bird down into the water slowly, leave it submerged for two or three seconds, and take it out. You want to dunk down past the twist tie but try not to dunk so far that the loosed end of the bag goes under water. This will assure that no water can channel down into the bag above the zip-tie. After shrink-bagging 3 or 4 birds, you’ll get the hang of it and be an expert.

Re-dunking is not recommended because it can introduce water into the bag through the vent hole.


Once the bag with bird has been "dunked and shrunked," trim off excess plastic above the zip-tie. Scissors will do the job. Leave a pigtail at least 1” long. And while you’re at it, snip the excess zip-tie tail down so it looks nice and neat.


The picture below shows the vent hole after the bag has been shrunk. This hole should be covered with freezer tape or a label with freezer adhesive.


Before applying tape or a label, the surface of the bag must be dry. A paper towel will absorb water and dry the area just fine...


The labels I used on the bagged chickens in this tutorial are not mine. They are sample labels that were sent to me by Stu McCarty at Grower’s Discount Labels. If you want custom labels with freezer adhesive for our poultry, I highly recommend Grower’s Discount Labels.

Freezer adhesive is important because you don’t want the labels to fall off when the chicken is frozen. If you don’t have a freezer adhesive on your labels, they will fall off.

It is important to note here that the freezer labels are not waterproof. Therefore, do not label the bird and put it back in a chill tank of water. If you do that,the label will fail and water will enter into the bag through the vent hole.


Here’s a beauty shot of the shrink-bagged chicken sporting the custom label from Grower’s Discount Labels...


This next picture shows the bottom of a shrink-bagged chicken, which is the head-and-neck end of the bird (without the head and neck, of course). This photo and the next few show another example label from the good folks at Grower’s Discount Labels.

====================
Update 1/26/13
For another shrink-bagging technique, be sure to check out "Good Idea #5" at This Link.  I've heard from a few people that this this approach works better for them.
====================


Here's a view of the flip side of the chicken (the side opposite the label), which is actually the back of the bird...


In the next picture you can see the sealed end of the packaged bird. Clearly, these shrink bags do a remarkably nice job of packaging a chicken.


This final view shows the nice two-color label from Grower’s Discount Labels...


Beyond the good looks of a shrink-bagged chicken is the matter of reduced potential for freezer burn. When the thick plastic (65 micron) barrier bag is shrunk tight to the bird, there is very little air left in the package and that translates into a significantly better frozen product. 

The picture below shows a chicken that was sealed in a Food-Saver vacuum sealer. It lost it’s vacuum seal in the freezer and suffered from freezer burn as a result.


With our shrink-bags, the plastic is shrunk tight to the bird—you can’t lose the seal like you can with an improperly sealed vacuum bag. 

And, of course, shrink-bagging is far better than just putting the chicken in a loose plastic bag with a twist tie. Sure, a loose bag is a less expensive packaging option, but you haven’t saved any money if your chickens get freezer burn and look like this six months later....


Another option for shrink-bagging chickens is to put the bagged bird in an egg basket for dunking. The basket shown in the picture below is from Murray McMurray Hatchery. You can order one at This Link.


Here's the shrink-bagged bird after dunking....


If your turkey fryer pot came equipped with a steamer basket, it will serve very well as a shrink-bagging basket...


Once again, we have a beautifully shrink-bagged chicken. No mess. No fuss. It's easy! ....


So there you have it. As you can see, our freezer bags are not only simple to use, they provide you with a practical and beautiful poultry packaging option.



Feedback & New Ideas
For Successful Shrink-Bagging

Please Note:
This Is Our Old Web Site.
You Can Still Order Here.
But The New Web Site is Better!

Click Here And Check It Out.



Dateline: 15 July 2012
.
 "The shrink bags we bought from you worked great and the birds look professionally packaged, even with my hand-written labels." (Todd Stevens, Oregon)
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It has now been one year since we started selling our Planet Whizbang poultry shrink bags online from this web site. We have sold a LOT of shrink bags and we’ve received a lot of great customer feedback. 

All the feedback has been entirely positive, with the exception of one person who said the bags would not shrink like I show in The Tutorial. The problem in that instance was a malfunctioning thermometer (if you get the temperature of your water up to 200 degrees, the bags will shrink).

The best feedback is, of course, when people who tried one of our “Easy kits” discovers how great the bags work and order more bags. A 25-bag Easy Kit, with zip-ties and freezer labels costs less than $20 (and that includes Priority shipping).

Sometimes, our customers pass on a good idea and this web page is dedicated to sharing those good ideas. If you have any tips, techniques, or advice that you’d like to share with fellow shrink-baggers, please contact me by e-mail at: Herrick@PlanetWhizbang.com

Good Idea #1

Loop the twisted bag end and zip-tie it.

Herrick,

I wanted to send you a thank-you e-mail for finding/selling the shrink-wrap bags for chicken processing.  The bags simplified our post-processing step and allowed us to get the birds into the freezer quickly.  They were simple and easy to use.  After we got the process worked out, I put our 12-year-old daughter in charge of packaging and labeling and she did a great job managing that station.  The only step I added differently than your tutorial was to double-over the twisted end of the bag before applying the zip tie which made a better seal.  It worked great.

This year we called our chicken-growing project "Meat for Missions" and donated all of the proceeds to a foreign missions project.  Many people who bought chickens came to participate in the processing day.  Including all the children, we had 26 people and processed 150+ birds in 5 hours.   It was hard work, but everyone had fun!  Talk about a community-building activity!

George C.
Ohio


I have used George's idea of twisting the end of the bag into a loop and zip-tying it (as shown in the picture above) and I think it's a great idea. Here are pictures showing the result.

The zip-tied loop after shrinking.


Another view of the zip-tied loop after shrinking.


Good Idea #2

The Sharpie-circle on this oven-shrunk bag of wings makes finding the air-vent-slice easy after shrinking.

Sometimes, after shrinking a bag, it's hard to find the small air-vent knife slice. This is especially the case when shrinking small bags of chicken parts (as discussed in Good Idea #3 below).  My friend, Pat Gorham, told me he solves this problem by drawing a circle on the bag, around the vent slice, with a Sharpie marker. It's a great idea that I wasted no time putting to use.

See how easy that was!


Good Idea #3

Our shrink bags can be used to shrink-package smaller chicken parts 

I'll take credit for this idea. I discovered that, by using an inexpensive ($30) impulse heat sealer, you can make smaller shrink bags out of our standard chicken-size bags.  And I've discovered that it is also possible to oven-shrink smaller bags. I explain it all at This Web Page.

Good Idea #4
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"That little hole you poke in the bag is not really necessary, in my opinion. It’s a problem. I realize that I probably wasn’t dunking fast enough but we got water in most of the bags, until I quit poking the hole. Try this: Don’t spin the bag….just twist it once and put the tie wrap on loosely…about 6 clicks to closed. Then hold the bag by the neck above the tie wrap and dunk to the wrap. Have a pliers or a tie wrap tug ready to go. As soon as the water reaches the tie wrap, yank that sucker closed and remove the bag from the water. Voile’! No air, no hole, no water. Just a well-shrunk bag with a very tight tie wrap." 
(From Jaye Bergamini, Eaton Rapids, Michigan)

Good Idea #5
My husband Dave Conway recently built one of your whizbang chicken pluckers. We processed 23 chickens today and it worked great! We purchased shrink bags and looked to your site for assistance on how to do this. We tried as suggested by Jaye Bergamini (Good Idea #4) but we had big chickens and it was hard to hold onto the bag while dunking. Dave took a piece of spaghetti tubing (used for drip irrigation but you could use any little tube) around 10” long, inserted it into the bag and twisted the bag around it with a zip tie. Tightened the zip tie snug. After 3 seconds in the water we pulled tube out and tightened the zip tie all the way. It gives you more to hang onto and really worked well. Pictures are attached! Good day to you and thank you for a wonderful website. 

Tube in bag.

Twist bag around tube.

Fasten zip tie

Finished product

Good Idea #6
(10-pound Birds in a 6-pound Bag)

We say that our standared 10" x 16" chicken shrink bags will hold a 6-pound dressed chicken (7 or even 8 pounds if you put some effort into it). But it so happens that Jeff Byrum has managed to get 10-pound chickens into a 6-pound bag. I'll let Jeff explain it ...

Just wanted to drop you a line and thank you for the great stuff you have.  I built a Whizbang chicken plucker a couple of years ago and could not imagine doing more than ten birds at a time if I had to hand pick the chickens, but with the plucker I easily raise and process 50 at a time.

Anyway, I butchered birds this past weekend at just under 10 weeks of age.  I knew they were big birds, but the 48 straight run birds averaged over seven and a half pounds!  The largest bird was a touch over TEN pounds!  I was a little concerned about getting the bird into the shrink bag since the largest I had ever had to put into a bag was less than nine pounds and I knew that was a tight fit.  But, with a little pushing and wing tucking I got that 10 pound bird, and the other half dozen 9 pound plus birds, into the bags, zip tied, and shrunk.  There wasn’t any excess bag to cut off, but they are in there. 

With so many large birds to fit into the bags, I developed a technique that worked very well for me to get the chickens into the bags in just seconds.   You start by holding the chicken by the sides, head down and wings under your hands, with the breast away from you.  Next, you slip the head end of the chicken into the bag up to the wings with a little bit of scrunched up bag on the bird.  Then, with your first two fingers holding the bag, put your thumbs in the last joint of the wings and tuck the wing tips into the bag.  This leaves the base of your thumbs just about right on the next joint of the wings and you can continue pulling the bag up with your fingers and shove the rest of the wings into the bag.  Once you have the wings in, it is all down hill from there and the rest of the bird easily slides into the bag.  Those bags are very tough; I never tore a single one.  I wish I had been able to take pictures of the process, but I haven’t figured out how to graft another arm on yet.

The whole time I was shoving birds into bags I kept thinking, “Boy wouldn’t it be nice to have some kind of a compression sleeve that you could slip the bag onto the bottom of then just shove the chicken in the top and right into the bag.”  I’ll have to do a little thinking and looking around on that one, but if I come up with something that works well I’ll let you know.
(Jeff Byrum, Greenville, Wisconsin)



Good Idea #7

I did some looking and found the industrial version of what I was thinking about for a sleeve.  I’ll have to see if I can reverse engineer something that will work.  Here is a link to the website I found, and a picture of the device [see below].  It doesn’t look too complicated. I think the method and tension holding the sides in is the key parameter to figure out.
(Jeff Byrum, Greenville, Wisconsin)

A manual bagging funnel (for getting big birds into small bags). Click Here for web page.


Good Idea #8
I'm waiting for someone to send me Good Idea #8. Don't be shy..... Herrick@PlanetWhizbang.com
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How To
Use Our Poultry Shrink Bags
To Package Smaller Bags of Chicken Parts
For The Freezer

Please Note:
This Is Our Old Web Site.
You Can Still Order Here.
But The New Web Site is Better!

Click Here And Check It Out.




Dateline: 15 July 2012
Updated: 30 August 2016

News Flash!!!!
We now have a YouTube video showing 
how we bag chicken parts with an impulse sealer 
and a heat gun. Click Here for details.


Our Planet Whizbang poultry shrink bags can be used to make and package smaller poultry parts like shown here.
.
The poultry bags we sell are sized and sold for bagging whole birds, as explained in This Photo Tutorial. However, we have recently discovered that our standard shrink bags can be made into smaller bags with an inexpensive impulse heat sealer, and small packages of poultry parts can be shrunk in hot water or with a heat gun. I see no reason why the techniques I’m about to show you can not be used to shrink-bag other kinds of meat, from pork chops to steaks and venison.

Toss The FoodSaver!

This is our FoodSaver® vacuum sealer. It's a Professional II Turbo model. I wish I could say it is a dependable machine, but it isn't. 

In past years, my wife (Marlene) and I have used a FoodSaver® vacuum sealer to package meat for the freezer. A FoodSaver® is an expensive device that uses expensive bags. But worse than the expense, we have found the FoodSaver® to be a very tempermental machine. It will work great for awhile and then it refuses to suck air out of the bags, or it just stops working altogether because it has overheated. If you have a FoodSaver® you know the dissatisfaction and the frustration these machines can bring into the bagging operation.

The shrink-bagging techniques that follow came about after Marlene informed me that our FoodSaver® was, once again, on the fritz (and we bought the Turbo model!). After fussing with it for a few minutes, I wondered why we couldn’t just use our amazing shrink bags for packaging smaller parts. 

I should explain that we had helped a friend process some of his pastured poultry and brought home ten chickens. After aging them in the fridge for three days, we decided to cut the chickens into legs, wings, and breasts, as I show in This Photo Essay (Marlene uses the necks and backs to make chicken stock as I explain in This Photo Essay). Here’s a picture of a beautiful pasture-raised chicken breast, ready to be bagged.
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A picture-perfect, pasture-raised chicken breast, ready for bagging & freezing


How To Make Small Shrink Bags 
Out Of Big Shrink Bags

Our round-bottom chicken shrink bags measure 10” x 16”. That’s a whole lot larger than a chicken breast. Not wanting to waste a whole bag for one little piece of meat, I decided to try using an inexpensive impulse heat sealer to see if I could make one chicken shrink bag into two smaller bags. Here’s a picture of the heat sealer.

I used a 12" heat sealer just like this.


I bought my heat sealer on Ebay a couple years ago for another purpose. The same model is currently available on Ebay for less than $30 (and that price includes the cost of shipping). 

It so happens that the impulse heat sealer does a great job of sealing the shrink bags. Here’s a picture of the chicken breast in a whole bag, and the bag over the sealer, ready to be heat-sealed.

Here's a chicken breast in the bottom of one of our round-bottom chicken-size shrink bags, about to be heat-sealed.

The impulse heat sealer has a dial with settings from 1 to 8. I put the dial at 5 and it seemed to do just fine there. To heat seal a bag, simply hold it over the heat bar, as shown in the picture above, and push the handle down against the bag. A small red light over the dial will come on to indicate that the heater is working. After the bag is sufficiently heat-sealed, the light goes off and you let off on the handle. 

In order to get a good seal, the bag needs to be positioned flat (no wrinkles) on the bottom bar. It’s best to hold it in place with two hands. Then have someone else press down on the arm. Or, if you’re by yourself, you can use your chin to press the arm down (where there’s a will, there’s a way).

After the seal is made, cut away the excess bag material, leaving about 1/2” of bag beyond the seal. The section of bag that you cut away (approximately half the bag) can then be sealed on one end, thus creating another bag to hold your next chicken part. We were able to get two bags out of each chicken-size bag. Here’s a picture of three pairs of chicken legs bagged up and ready to heat shrink.

Three bags of chicken legs, ready to shrink. You'll notice that we heat-sealed the bags up closer to the meat in this picture, making tighter bags. (click any of the pictures on this page to see an enlarged view)


Heat-Shrinking Small Bags 
With Hot Water

Before shrinking  a bag in hot water, it is absolutely necessary that you pierce the bag with a knife (an approximately 3/8” long slice works well) in order to provide a way for air in the bag to escape when it shrinks. 

The sealed bag must be pierced with an air-vent hole prior to shrinking. A 3/8" long knife slice is ideal.

Here’s a picture of me putting the bagged chicken breast down into the 190 to 200-degree water.

Here I am dunking the chicken breast into hot water to shrink the bag tight. I like using the steamer basket, and the big spoon served to hold the package down while dunking.

And here is a close-up of the shrunk chicken breast. 

That's a perfectly packaged chicken breast for you!

As you probably know, the underside of the underlying bone that the breast meat is attached to is concave. The shrink bag did not shrink into the concave shape, as a vacuum bag would be more inclined to do. So there is a small hollow section with air in it on the underside of the bagged breast. But I don’t think that’s any problem.

Here’s a picture of a hot-water-shrunk bag of chicken legs.

Two shrink-bagged legs. This is chicken packaging at it's very best.


Shrinking small, heat-sealed bags of chicken parts in hot water worked well, but there is definitely a learning curve, just as there is when shrink-bagging whole birds. You want to submerge the bags in the hot water only long enough for the air bubbles to escape out of the bag, and no longer. If you leave the bag in the water any longer, some water may seep into the knife-sliced vent hole. And that’s not what you want, especially if your chicken parts were nicely air dried as was the case with the chickens we were bagging. 

Oven-Shrinking 
Small Bags of Chicken Parts

As I was shrinking bags in hot water I wondered if I might be able to accomplish the same results by placing the bagged chicken parts in a hot oven. That would be a whole lot easier than heating up a pot of hot water and dunking the bags. And there would then be no chance of introducing any water into a bag through the air-vent slice. And the outside of the bag would not need to be dried off before applying the freezer label (our freezer labels are not waterproof). So I set our kitchen oven to 450-degrees and waited for it to heat up.

I put a bagged chicken breast on a small cookie rack, pierced a vent-slice in it, opened the oven door, put the rack on the top shelf, and closed the door. The plastic immediately shriveled up. Fifteen seconds seemed like a good length of time, and I removed the rack with the bagged breast on it.

Here you can clearly see the difference between chicken breasts shrink-bagged in hot water (left) and in the oven (right).

The result was not exactly what I had hoped for. Instead of shrinking up smooth and tight to the skin of the bird, the oven-shrunk bag shrunk up less tightly and with ripples in the surface. Evidently, the pressure of water on a submerged bag serves an important smoothing function that can not be achieved by just applying oven-heat to the bag. The eye-appeal of a hot-water-shrunk bag is excellent, but the eye-appeal of an oven-shrunk bag is comparatively poor.

Two chicken legs in an oven-shrunk bag.


Nevertheless, under that wrinkled plastic exterior, the meat was still the same wholesome meat as under the better-looking bag. And, even with the wrinkles, the bags were shrunk and sealed very nicely. Marlene and I concluded that, for our own use, we don’t care if the outside appearance of the package is less appealing. The sheer convenience of oven shrinking small bags was enough to convince us that this is the way we’re going to do this from now on. 

Ten chickens were reduced to a big pan of packaged parts, all nicely shrink-bagged.

Another Oven-Shrinking Session

A couple weeks after our first experience with oven-shrinking bags of chicken parts, we cut up and shrink-bagged 13 more chickens using oven heat. Eight of the chickens were for our friend, Sandy, who came to watch and help. Sandy was impressed with how easy it was to seal and shrink the bags of parts. And she didn’t seem to mind that the bags had some surface ripples. Here’s a big bag of Sandy’s chicken wings that was oven shrunk, in 15 seconds.

This bag of wings was oven shrunk... 15 seconds is all it takes.

We did have a little problem with the impulse heat sealer during the second bagging session. It was not sealing the bags very well. I’m not sure what the problem was but the sealer came with two spare heating strips. So I installed a new one, and the machine worked perfectly again. The replacement required only a phillips screwdriver and took about 5 minutes. I should point out that the heat sealer was used quite a bit a couple years ago and I haven't had any previous problems with it.

Also, after the bagged chickens have been in the freezer for awhile, I've noticed that the freezer-adhesive labels are not sticking as well to the oven-shrunk bags. The rippled surface isn't the best to stick a label on. But the labels have not fallen off—they are just loose. I think that if we make a point of smoothing them down real well (something that wasn't done) with finger pressure when they're first applied, that will help them stick better.

Update
16 July 2012

Our poultry shrink bags work nicely for blueberries too, and the heat gun seems to work better than an oven. 

After reading the above essay, my friend Tom Quinn e-mailed me to suggest that a heat gun might work to shrink the bagged chicken parts better than a hot oven. I didn't have any more chicken parts to shrink, but I had 20 pounds of blueberries that Marlene and I picked.

Marlene usually puts the blueberries in quart-size ziplock bags, and then into the freezer. I was keen to try the heat gun/shrink bag idea.

I can tell you that one chicken-size shrink bag will make two bags that will each hold a quart of berries. And they shrink up real nice with a heat gun. If you heat more on one side of the bag than the other, it will have a curl to it, but that's just a cosmetic thing. The berries are not damaged by the shrinking or the heating, and there is less air in the shrunk bag than in a sealed ziplock bag.

I will definitely be trying the heat gun on my next batch of chicken parts for the freezer. I think the bags will shrink smoother than they do in the oven.

Thanks Tom!


Update
26 June 2013



After further experimentation with the heat gun, I have come to the conclusion that it is the absolute best way to shrink-bag chicken parts. Click Here to read a photo-essay with more details about using a heat gun for shrinking.


In Conclusion

If you want to shrink-bag chicken parts (or blueberries) I hope this little report has inspired you to do some experimenting on your own. I think you’ll be pleased with the results. I’d love to hear about any discoveries you make in this area of shrink bagging meat for the home freezer. Contact me at: Herrick@PlanetWhizbang.com



Close-up of shrink-bagged blueberries.