The Kashrus of Poultry - Rabbi Yosef Karsik shlita

00:02 Speaker 1 You’re listening to “Lema’an Yishme’u,” a podcast of Machon Halacha Chabad.

00:09 Speaker 2 This class will deal with one of the important parts of the kitchen: chicken. Chicken is very common in kitchens today. It’s relatively inexpensive, and it also presents fewer kashrus problems. Mehadrin kosher chicken is widely available, with many different certifications. I’ll give a brief overview of what those certifications mean and the problems that can arise. In general, the standards of chicken kashrus today are very, very high compared with the past. In the past, a shochet would pass through a village and slaughter a person’s chicken. His knife wasn’t checked as professionally as knives are checked today, and the knives weren’t of the same high quality. The shochet also had to know how to check the lungs, the tendons, and the other things that affect a chicken’s kosher status. Today, with large-scale systems, people who specialize in knives, high-quality knives, and good shochtim, there are generally very significant advantages. But there are also points that need attention to ensure that kashrus standards are maintained. Broadly speaking, there are five elements involved in bringing chicken to the highest kashrus standard. First, supervising the transport of the chicken and the chicken itself before shechitah, to make sure everything is in the best possible condition from a kashrus standpoint. The most important thing, accounting for ninety-five percent of the chicken’s kashrus, is the shechitah itself: that it be done properly. I’ll explain that shortly. Then come the checks of the chicken—the lungs, the tendons, [unclear], and various small details connected with these. After that comes salting the chicken to remove its blood, and the last thing is proper packaging, so it reaches our homes without, G-d forbid, any falsification. So let’s start at the beginning. Chickens receive injections so they’ll grow properly. Today, chickens are raised for about forty days, a little less,

02:58 Speaker 2 from the time the chick hatches from the egg until it is slaughtered. That’s very fast growth. They’ve succeeded in developing this process effectively, and the vast majority—almost ninety-nine percent—of the chickens are healthy and sound. They don’t have time to contract diseases or eat unhealthy things. They’re raised in designated coops; there’s no waste in the coop or the enclosure where they grow. They’re kept in their enclosures almost from the day they hatch, so there are almost no problems. The chicks are given injections, and today every kashrus certification has supervision that begins in the coop, ensuring the injections are given properly and don’t disqualify the chick. There are different methods of giving injections and different views on the best way to do it from a kashrus standpoint. Generally, when someone buys a chicken at the supermarket, they should know that under the rabbinate that gave it its certification—and this applies to all the rabbinates—the chick received its injections under rabbinic supervision. The difference between the various certifications is not whether they supervise this. Almost all of them do, and in the end there are no problems with it. Afterward, when the chickens arrive at the slaughterhouse in coops or enclosures on a truck, they’re unloaded onto the conveyor line for shechitah. This, too, isn’t done by hand; it’s all done with tractors or forklifts, so there’s no concern that a chicken might fall and be injured, creating a kashrus question. Generally, up to the point of shechitah, there are more or less almost no real problems. I mean, real problems could arise, but given the current state of the market, in my humble opinion everything is fine. Now we come to the heart of the matter: shechitah. First of all, slaughtering a chicken is relatively easy. There is shechitah of chickens, turkeys,

05:36 Speaker 2 and cattle. Generally speaking, slaughtering chickens is easy when they’re a reasonable, standard size—2.2 or 2.3 kilograms. The shochet holds the chicken in one hand and slaughters it with the other. But who is the shochet? The shochet must be a G-d-fearing Jew. The laws in Yoreh De’ah, most of which concern kashrus, begin with the laws governing the shochet. The method of shechitah and related matters begin in siman 18 of Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh De’ah, but siman 1, the foundation of kashrus, begins with the shochet’s identity, his fear of Heaven, and his holiness. There’s a story about Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, the advocate of the Jewish people. Once he arrived in a village where no one knew who he was. They didn’t know he was the holy Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev. A butcher met him and said, “My Jewish friend, do you happen to know how to perform shechitah?” The Berditchever replied, “Yes.” So the butcher said, “Could you do me a favor and slaughter this animal for me? Otherwise I have to bring a shochet from another town, and that takes time. I’ll pay you double for the shechitah. Could you slaughter my animal?” The Berditchever said, “No problem, I’m willing to slaughter it for you, but first do me a small favor. I’ve come here and I need a loan of twenty rubles. I need the loan for my wife.” The butcher said, “Who are you? How can I lend you money? I don’t know you. How do I know you’ll pay it back?” The Berditchever said, “You don’t trust me with twenty rubles, but you’re willing to entrust me with the kashrus of your animal’s shechitah? If you don’t believe I’ll return the twenty rubles, how

07:50 Speaker 2 can you believe I’ll slaughter your animal properly? Aren’t you worried that I might render the shechitah non-kosher, and then you’ll feed hundreds of Jews non-kosher food? Why doesn’t that concern you?” That is how Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev rebuked him. The lesson of this story for us is that the responsibility involved in shechitah is enormous. There are things that no one will ever be able to determine afterward—whether the animal is kosher—except the shochet himself. One example is derasah, pressing down with the knife. What does that mean? The shochet holds the chicken’s neck and moves the knife back and forth, thereby slaughtering the chicken—or the turkey or the animal, whether a sheep or a goat. But he must not press down. If he pushes down forcefully, that is called shechitah by derasah, and the animal is not kosher. It’s not only striking it like an axe that renders it non-kosher. Even if I move the knife across the neck but press down hard with it, I’ve rendered the animal non-kosher. No one—not even the shochet’s wife or the rabbi of the slaughterhouse—will be able to know if the shochet moved the knife while pressing down a little, making the animal or chicken non-kosher. No one will ever be able to check that. Some things can be checked, such as whether the knife has a nick, but this cannot. That’s why the shochet must truly be G-d-fearing. At a kosher slaughterhouse—and that means every slaughterhouse—the shochet can take a chicken he has slaughtered and put it in a crate set aside, the enclosure for non-kosher chickens. If the shochet says it isn’t kosher, no one will ask him, “Why did you declare that chicken non-kosher?” Because if you put pressure on him, perhaps, G-d forbid—I don’t believe this could happen, G-d forbid—he might not put a non-kosher chicken there. The shochet has sole discretion to decide about that chicken.

10:22 Speaker 2 There could have been a slaughter that was not done properly, with no one able to see it, and then his concerns about declaring a bird treif would not arise. In any case, when it comes to the kashrus of poultry—not animals, where there are many other issues—all the other factors account for less than five percent. Ninety-five percent of its kashrus depends on the quality of the shochet and his fear of Heaven. Now, a shochet has a knife that is at least twice the length of the neck. Before he goes up to slaughter, he has to check that the knife is sharp and smooth. If there is even the slightest nick in the knife—and there are various rules about this that we won’t go into now—the chicken is completely treif. The chicken or animal is not kosher. Even though we trust the shochet one hundred percent, it is not enough for him to check the knife himself before going up to slaughter. Someone else has to check it too. Two people check that the knife is kosher: the shochet himself and another person at the slaughterhouse whose job is to inspect knives. That is what he does. He does not go up to slaughter; he checks the knives. They take the knife and run a fingernail back and forth along it to see that there is no nick. There are six checks: they check the edge of the knife, back and forth, then along the lower right side and the lower left side, back and forth. Six in all. In the time of our Sages, they performed twelve checks. They also checked with a fingernail and with the flesh of a finger. But in recent centuries, they stopped checking with the flesh and check only with a fingernail. Either way, when the shochet comes to begin his workday, he needs to sit down calmly half an hour, or a quarter of an hour, beforehand and check the knife, prepare

12:51 Speaker 2 it, and sharpen it on the stone. There are several kinds of stones used to smooth the knife and remove any flaws. Then he presents it to the knife inspector, and if the inspector approves it, he can go up to slaughter. If not, he cannot go up to slaughter. Today, a shochet works for half an hour and rests for half an hour. An average shift for a shochet is between four and six hours, and that is four hours gross. In other words, he works for half an hour and then sits for half an hour, preparing his knife—or he may have another knife. He rests, eats, drinks, reads a little, studies a little, relaxes, and goes up for the next round of slaughter. Before each time he goes up, as I said, two people check the knife. Today’s knives are very, very high quality, made of well-forged steel, so they almost never find a nick after slaughter that actually makes the birds treif. Checking a knife is a very, very intricate task. It takes a very composed, calm person with an exceptionally sensitive touch to run a fingernail along the knife. Sometimes I come to the slaughterhouse, check a knife, and say everything is fine. Then I give it to our inspector to check, and he tells me, “There’s a problem here.” He tells me where, and I check again but cannot find it. Then he says, “Go over it again.” And then I say, “Yes, there is a problem here,” and I find it. Some people have a special sensitivity. No, it has nothing to do with halachic or rabbinic expertise. It is more a physical ability: having an especially sensitive finger. It could be a young person, or an older person who still has the delicacy and ability to feel it properly. Your hands must be

15:00 Speaker 2 neither too cold nor too warm, so you can properly feel whether the knife is perfectly smooth. The shochet goes up to slaughter. On average, he slaughters between nine and eleven or twelve birds a minute. He stands there, and a non-Jewish worker hands him the bird. He takes it in his hand, stretches out its neck, and slaughters it. He checks with his thumb that the slaughter was done properly, and places the slaughtered bird in a container, where it begins its journey to having its feathers removed. We’ll continue the chicken’s journey in a moment. Every five minutes—meaning roughly every fifty birds, since he slaughters around ten chickens a minute—the shochet checks the knife. In the middle of slaughtering, he runs his fingernail back and forth twice along the edge; he does not perform the full check. If he finds no problem, he continues. Every five minutes, a light comes on to remind him: “Mr. Shochet, it’s time to check the knife.” If everything went smoothly, fine. But what happens if he finds a nick? First, let me describe the slaughtering platform, where the shochetim stand. Say that at a slaughterhouse where I supervise the kashrus, there are about ten shochetim. Together they slaughter an average of ninety-five to one hundred birds a minute. That means each one slaughters about nine and a half to ten birds a minute. A nick is rare. By rare, I mean that once a year or once every two years, a knife develops a nick severe enough to make a bird treif—one that catches a fingernail or even a hair as you run it along the blade. What makes it treif? You run your fingernail along the knife and it catches; your fingernail cannot continue along it. It simply gets stuck. Or you run a beard hair along it and the hair catches. That makes it completely treif. This is rare with chickens,

17:31 Speaker 2 but it happens more often with turkeys. Why? Because chickens are generally raised in clean coops and small enclosures, while turkeys, first of all, are older. They are slaughtered at four, five, six, or even seven months old. Turkey coops are very muddy and have a lot of material spread on the floor to keep the birds from getting bacteria and dirt on their feet. So their coops are very, very dirty, and when they arrive for slaughter, their necks are very dirty too. There may even be stones there. Turkeys also eat all sorts of debris, including glass. They can eat nails, glass, and stones. Anything that does not move, a turkey can gobble up. So sometimes the knife is damaged during slaughter, and with turkeys this happens quite often. I can tell you that at the turkey slaughterhouse where I supervise the kashrus, a knife catches on average once every two or three days. At a chicken slaughterhouse, it may take a year, or a year and a half, for a knife to reach the point where a bird is definitely treif. Perhaps a little less, but we are talking about many months. Now let us consider a situation where there is a treif bird: the knife has developed a nick that makes it treif. This brings us to the halachic discussion of bittul, nullification. As we all know, kashrus has a code of laws: the Shulchan Aruch. Kashrus does not come from my gut feeling or from a grandmother’s stringencies. Its laws come from our rabbinic authorities, from the Gemara in Tractate Chullin, then the Rambam and the early authorities, until they are codified as halachah in the Shulchan Aruch and the Rema. According to halachah, if a treif chicken gets mixed in with two kosher chickens, it is nullified by the majority. But there is a qualification. I won’t go into these laws at length now. In section 101 of the Shulchan Aruch, it says that it is not nullified by the majority if it is considered a piece fit to serve to an honored guest. What does that mean? If you have a substantial piece that you could serve to a guest at your table, then if a piece of

19:49 Speaker 2 A treif piece got mixed into a thousand, or two thousand, or ten thousand chickens—non-kosher pieces, all of them treif. In other words, what can be nullified by a majority, or nullified in sixty? Only something that is not considered a piece fit to serve an honored guest, or a whole creature, or an item counted individually. We won’t go into the details now. Back to our subject. If a chicken was slaughtered and the knife was found to be defective, then from the perspective of the rabbi—the slaughterhouse rabbi—all fifty chickens the shochet slaughtered in those five minutes are treif. At the end of the five minutes, he found a defect in his knife. As the rabbi in charge, I have to consider all fifty chickens the shochet slaughtered in the last five minutes treif. The defect might already have occurred with the first chicken. I have no idea when his knife became defective. But there are nine other shochetim working alongside him whose chickens are kosher, so this is certainly nullified by a majority. If I learn about the incident while the chicken is still in its feathers, then according to the halachic rulings—perhaps the Rosh disagrees, but according to both the Shulchan Aruch and the Rema—that chicken is nullified by a majority. In short, the chicken is kosher, and consequently these chickens will be kosher. They won’t be mehadrin min hamehadrin; they won’t be glatt, but halachically they are kosher. Why? Because the treif chicken is nullified by a majority. But if the shochet didn’t check at the end of five minutes and was negligent in his duties, and the chicken continued on its journey—which we’ll get to shortly—and has already reached the chiller, a large pool where it is together with several thousand other chickens, perhaps 3,100 or 3,200 of them, then by the time it reaches the chiller, it has already been cleaned of its feathers and is considered a piece fit to serve an honored guest. According to the Rema and according to the Maharan[?]—but not the Shulchan Aruch. According to the Rema, it is considered a piece fit to serve an honored guest. So I have to take those 3,200

22:06 Speaker 2 chickens and declare them treif. And that shochet is essentially responsible for this situation because he didn’t check his knife at the end of five minutes. These are rare situations that might happen once every few years, because, first, the knife generally isn’t defective, and second, the shochet really does check every five minutes. If he doesn’t check every five minutes, there is oversight. Every part of the place is filmed. Someone’s job is to review the slaughter, to go over the camera footage and see that he really checks every five minutes. There is also a supervisor above them: a man, himself a rabbi, stands above the entire line of shochetim and supervises them, making sure they work properly, check their knives, and that there are no problems with the slaughter. In any case, these things are only theoretical and almost never happen in practice. I just want to explain and reassure the public when people talk about nullification by a majority or nullification in sixty. Anyone who eats food—the entire kosher food industry is built on nullification. You eat spices; you buy paprika. Do you think the kashrus agency’s mashgiach checked every gram of paprika? Do you think he checked every single bit of the spice to make sure there were no insects? No. Rather, we follow halachah. You take a sack: a container arrives, a pallet arrives with thirty sacks, each containing twenty kilos. You sample two sacks, checking two or three kilos. What if you find no insects? There could be insects elsewhere. According to halachah, if you checked and didn’t find three insects, I treat the entire lot as kosher. Now you’re talking about flour that has passed through a sieve. Insects could have gotten in afterward or been there beforehand. So I don’t want to get into every issue of kashrus now. The kashrus that

24:07 Speaker 2 people rely on is built on the Shulchan Aruch, not on stringencies we bring in from I don’t know where. So if, according to the Shulchan Aruch, this is kosher to the highest standard of mehadrin min hamehadrin, then it is kosher. A person may say, “I want to be stricter about this,” but there is a whole range of kashrus issues across every area of food. And don’t say, “If I do it in my own home, there won’t be any problems. I’ll slaughter the chicken at home, and there won’t be any problems.” Do you know how to inspect the junction of the tendons? Do you understand how to inspect a chicken’s lungs? How would you know whether these things are kosher or not? Do you know what the buka de’atma is? Do you know what problems can arise in the wings? Do you know how to prepare a knife to the highest standard? Who can prepare a knife better: someone who slaughters one chicken a week or once a month, or someone whose job is to sharpen knives—a professional knife inspector, a slaughterhouse rabbi, a kashrus rabbi? These are the standards of kashrus. So if you say, “I’ll do it myself at home,” you won’t reach the standard of kosher preparation a chicken receives at the slaughterhouse—not with the knife, not with the inspections, and not with the salting. That’s where the highest standards of kashrus are reached. Sometimes you might say they use leniencies, but these aren’t leniencies. This is the ruling of the Shulchan Aruch: it is kosher from the outset, to the highest standard of mehadrin min hamehadrin. And sometimes, if you say, “I won’t rely on that; I’ll do things differently myself,” you’ll end up relying on far greater leniencies. You could make your kitchen treif if you don’t know how to kasher it, or make your countertop treif, along with a thousand and one other things. So, as a rabbi who provides kashrus certification in dozens of fields and for dozens of types of food, I can say that when it comes to chicken kashrus—which is what I’m talking about now—

25:43 Speaker 2 it is truly rare for there to be a problem. It is kosher to the highest standard of mehadrin min hamehadrin, without any concern. So the shochet stands on the slaughtering platform. There is a great deal of noise there. Besides the ten shochetim, another ten non-Jewish workers stand on the platform, each one handing over a chicken. There is their foreman, who supervises them, and the rabbi who supervises the platform. On average, twenty-five people stand on that platform. There is bright lighting so they can see and no mistakes occur during slaughter. And there is a lot of noise from the chickens and from trucks carrying chickens—the live ones arriving at the shochetim, and trucks carrying the containers of slaughtered chickens onward to the next stage. So we are with the shochet holding the chicken in his hand. He slaughters it, tries to check the knife immediately with his thumb, and places the chicken upside down so that the blood coming from the windpipe, the neck, and the veins drains out. Here the chicken begins its journey toward salting. First, its feathers must be plucked. About two minutes and forty seconds pass from the moment the shochet finishes slaughtering until the chicken comes out of the automatic machines that remove its feathers. After that, the chicken continues on to a manual check for remaining feathers, because the machines don’t clean it one hundred percent. This has halachic implications for the question of nullification we discussed earlier—whether it is considered a piece fit to serve an honored guest or not. In any case, another three minutes pass before the chicken is fully cleaned of feathers. They clip the tips of its wings, because there is a lot of blood there, to prevent trapped blood. I’ll explain that later. I want to go back to the point of slaughter. The shochet lifts the chicken in his hand. He has to slaughter it. Whether this chicken is treif or not, this chicken is forbidden

28:12 Speaker 2 To return alive. It came from the poultry house. There is veterinary supervision, and even if the shochet picks up a chicken and sees that it is sick, that it is treif, that its shechitah will not make it kosher because its wings are broken, he still has to slaughter it. Before doing so, he determines that this chicken is treif. Once he has slaughtered it, he puts it in the treif cage. He leaves his station and goes over to that cage, where a mashgiach makes sure a non-Jewish worker does not accidentally put it back on the line. Sometimes he sees that a chicken’s wing is hanging loose, and that wing is therefore forbidden. According to halachah, the shochet’s shechitah permits the entire bird, the entire animal, but it does not permit a limb that was detached, or left dangling, while the animal was alive, before the shechitah. So if the wing was hanging loose before the shechitah, the shechitah will not permit it. The shochet picks up the chicken and feels that its wing was broken and hanging loose before the shechitah. He still has to slaughter the chicken, but afterward he must put it in a special section. A mashgiach will later come and supervise the removal of that wing, which is not kosher because it is a limb from a living animal, forbidden even to non-Jews. The chicken then goes back onto the conveyor, onto the hooks, to continue on to plucking. Let’s move on to the wings. One of the distinctive concerns of the most stringent kashrus standards is trapped blood. I’ll explain it now, and go into more detail later when we get to salting. According to halachah, salting meat is effective even if the meat is very thick. Even if you take a piece of beef ten or fifteen centimeters thick, salt it thoroughly on both sides, and carry out the entire salting process, which we’ll see later, all the blood inside comes out according to halachah.

30:36 Speaker 2 If a homemaker takes frozen, koshered meat—not merely kosher meat, but meat whose blood has been removed through salting—and opens the frozen package, liquid comes out. That is not blood. It is called meat juice, and it is kosher from the outset even by the strictest standards; no one disputes that. Salting draws out all the forbidden blood, and afterward everything is kosher without any concern. But salting draws out only the blood naturally absorbed in the limbs or contained in the blood vessels. If the meat—the bird or animal—was struck while alive and a pocket of blood formed, with blood collecting in that particular spot, that is called trapped blood: blood confined to one place. You can salt the bird thoroughly all around, but if that pocket is enclosed within the skin and flesh, the blood will not come out, and it will remain forbidden. Not only is that blood forbidden, but because it was salted, the salt has, in halachic terms, cooked it somewhat, and the meat will also be forbidden to a peel’s depth. There are many halachic aspects to this, which we’ll touch on later. So when someone opens a package of frozen chicken, beef, or turkey at home and sees red liquid coming out, that is not blood. It is meat juice and is kosher from the outset by the strictest standards. But if he sees a pocket of blood—I’ll give a few examples shortly—he has to remove it and certainly must not put it in the pot. It is completely treif, and putting it over a fire after salting will not help; it remains completely treif. You have to remove it, along with a little more meat to a peel’s depth, cutting away a bit of the surrounding meat that does not contain blood. This is very, very common at the tips of

32:54 Speaker 2 chicken wings. There are many places where blood collects at the wing tips. That is why, under the rules of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel—which has primary responsibility for kashrus throughout Israel and does sacred work; the special, holy work it does is beyond description, though this is not the place to elaborate—the wing tips must be cut off. Some remove the entire third section of the wing. In fact, the main difference between chicken produced to the very highest mehadrin standard by some badatzim and ordinary chicken that is also labeled mehadrin is not necessarily the knives. The shochatim and the knives used by the badatzim may be of lower quality. Perhaps they are paid less; perhaps the regular rabbinates have better shochatim because they pay more and offer steadier work. We’ll get to the inspections of the tendons and lungs later. There is not necessarily an advantage to a badatz. There is one advantage if it is a high-quality badatz: it checks that all the blood spots are removed before salting. I’ll explain more about the trapped blood shortly. This also has disadvantages, which I’ll come to in a moment. So if a person buys a whole chicken, or even if he buys it in pieces, and sees blood spots, he must remove them. I don’t mean red-colored liquid running out of the chicken. There is absolutely no problem with that, whether it comes from chicken, beef, or turkey; it is kosher from the outset by the strictest standards, and no one disputes it. If you see a visible blood spot, it is treif. Incidentally, that is not so simple either: if the blood became trapped because of a blow after the shechitah, it is not treif. But I can’t—well, not everyone is familiar with these matters. So a person

34:59 Speaker 2 should act as follows: if he sees a pocket of blood in beef or chicken, he should cut it out and throw it away. Let’s continue following the chicken; I’ll go back over the process. There was the shechitah. The machines removed the feathers. The workers removed the small remaining feathers and cut off the wing tips. Now we come to what is called the junction of the tendons. Tendons are bands in an animal’s body, like very strong cords relative to its weight. Hakadosh Boruch Hu created tendons suited to each living creature—by Hashem’s kindness—so that they hold the muscles and flesh around the bone. Every living creature has tendons: people, animals, birds, every creature. We know about tendons from Parshas Vayishlach in Bereishis, from the account of Yaakov Avinu limping on his thigh. Since then, the sciatic nerve has been forbidden in animals, and removing it is a very important task in preparing meat from livestock—livestock, I should say. In chickens, though, the tendons themselves are kosher from the outset, without any problem. So what is the problem with tendons? If a tendon is torn, the chicken is treif. There is a junction of tendons in the chicken’s leg, where several tendons meet; if one of them is torn, that chicken is treif. How common is this tendon problem in today’s chickens? On ordinary, healthy farms it is extremely rare. What does “extremely rare” mean? There is a halachic category called a minority. Forty-nine percent of chickens is a minority. Then there is a category called an uncommon minority, which is less than ten percent. On healthy farms, how many chickens have damaged tendons? Not forty-nine percent, not ten percent, and not even one percent. Fewer than a tenth of a percent. In other words, one percent is one in a hundred, and a tenth of a percent is one in a thousand. Fewer than one in a thousand have a defect that makes them treif. Now there are three ways to

37:45 Speaker 2 They check the tendons. Some check them in the lower part of the chicken’s foot, in what’s colloquially called the “yellow part.” Some check them in the leg itself, and some check by touch. I’ll explain the advantages of each method. Some people buy a chicken leg and see that it has been opened up; it isn’t whole. That’s where the internal examination takes place, and it’s a very thorough examination. But there’s a drawback. What is it? Later, when we get to salting, as I mentioned earlier, according to halachah, if you salt a whole piece of meat—even if it’s twenty centimeters thick or more—salting it on both sides makes it kosher from the outset, without any doubt. But if there’s an opening in it, you have to put salt inside that opening. If you didn’t, then according to the Rema, that chicken has not been properly koshered; the meat is not kosher to eat. The Shulchan Aruch says that after the fact, if it was salted on one side, it’s kosher. That’s what it says in sections 8 and 9. But the Rema says it isn’t kosher. Now, if I open the leg to check whether the tendons are kosher, then when the workers salt the chicken, they have to put salt thoroughly inside that opening in the leg. That’s the first thing. Second, if the salt remains inside afterward and isn’t removed within twelve hours, the whole leg becomes forbidden, because the salt cooks the blood. The salt has to be cleaned out afterward, as we’ll see later. So when you open the leg to check the tendons, you do examine them, and you know with almost one hundred percent certainty whether the chicken is kosher or not. Why do I say “almost”? Because the people checking the tendons aren’t always skilled. They know

40:03 Speaker 2 how to check properly, but even with professionals, mistakes can always happen. So it’s almost one hundred percent. But you have the drawback that the salting won’t always be done properly, and sometimes, according to the Rema, the meat won’t be kosher because of the salting and the blood will have been cooked. The Shulchan Aruch disagrees; in one place he says it’s forbidden by Torah law, and in another, by rabbinic law. So some say, “I don’t want to check in the upper part of the leg, because the loss may outweigh the gain. If I’m watching chickens go by and I see that on this particular day a tenth of a percent, or less, are not kosher, why should I open up one hundred percent of the birds? Then I know I won’t manage to kosher all of them properly through salting; I’ll have problems with the salting. So I check only by touch and sight.” Because even among that tenth of a percent, anyone with some understanding can feel the chicken and tell with certainty whether the tendons are damaged. You can also see it, and that’s enough. Others say, “No, I’ll check below, in the yellow part.” Now, the yellow part is cut off before salting, so there’s no salting problem. On the other hand, checking down there is less precise. When you open it below, you can’t assess the tendons with the same certainty as when you check in the leg. So I’ve explained the three methods of checking the tendons. Some—and many smaller kashrus organizations do this—check in the leg itself. That has advantages and disadvantages: the advantage is knowing with almost one hundred percent certainty whether the tendons make it not kosher; the disadvantage is the potential problem with salting. Some check in the yellow part. The advantage is that there’s no salting problem, because the yellow feet are cut off before salting. But the examination isn’t as definitive

42:05 Speaker 2 as checking the tendons in the leg itself—sorry. And some check only by touch. With an examination by touch alone, if it’s done by a skilled checker—people who sit there day after day, six to twelve hours a day, checking the line—they can tell with certainty. They have extensive experience, having checked hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds, and they can already feel by touch whether a bird is kosher or not. By the way, since I mentioned this, I’ll add something. The kashrus supervisors at the slaughterhouses—the ones who sit checking the tendons, the lungs, which we’ll get to shortly, and so on—are not like the shochtim. The shochtim work for half an hour and rest for half an hour, or work for an hour and rest for half an hour. Even so, the supervisors’ work is not as hard as a shochet’s. Can you imagine what it means for a shochet to hold a bird in his hand? A bird weighs two kilos and two hundred grams, or two and a half kilos—let’s say two and a half. If he handles ten birds a minute, that’s twenty-five kilos a minute. In ten minutes, that’s two hundred and fifty kilos passing through his hands; in half an hour, seven hundred and fifty kilos. He works for half an hour. If he works a ten-hour day, seven and a half tons pass through his hands. So it’s hard work. That’s why the shochet needs a break every half hour. When the half hour is over, he sits down, relaxes, takes a short rest, drinks something and has a bite to eat so he’ll have more strength to continue working. Let’s return to our journey through the processing of a chicken. We’ve covered the shechitah, the cleaning and the clipping of the wings. We’ve now covered the checking of the tendons; next come the lungs. The chicken

44:02 Speaker 2 continues along to a machine that extracts its internal organs. It removes the intestines and all the internal organs, including the lungs. Then supervisors sit and watch the birds go by with their lungs exposed. Their job is to look at them. I won’t go into the details now of the kashrus requirements and the examination of chickens’ lungs, because even the general question of what a particular change means isn’t clear today. If they see a certain change and sense that there’s a kashrus problem, they remove the bird. This, too, is generally a very, very small number—not even half a percent. It may be a tenth of a percent. And even then, if we were to debate the halachah of each lung individually—whether it had become unfit or not—I’m sure I would rule that some of those birds were kosher. But the cost of having a rabbi examine those lungs is such that it’s cheaper for the plant to discard the birds. Now let’s skip ahead to the better-known part: salting the chicken. Salting involves three steps. First, washing the chicken and soaking it in water. Second, salting it. Third, cleaning it—removing the salt from the chicken. I’ll explain. There are also several differences in how different kashrus organizations salt chickens, which I’ll explain now. First, let’s look at it in general. Before salting the chicken, it has to be soaked in water and rinsed. Why? The Shulchan Aruch gives two reasons. One is that salting works on blood absorbed inside the meat. But if the chicken has blood on its exterior, the salt will only cook that blood, making the outer surface of the meat not kosher. So the first step is to wash it, to remove all the blood left on the chicken from the shechitah, when blood flowed all over it,

46:32 Speaker 2 They’ve cut it here at the wings, the tendons, the lungs; it’s covered in blood, so they wash it to remove the blood. The second reason is to soften it so the salt can draw the blood out. If you take a frozen chicken and put salt on it, the blood won’t come out. That isn’t considered salting. But the same is true if the chicken is shriveled and dry: the blood won’t come out. You soak it in water for half an hour, and then the salt can do its job. The chicken is more pliable, and the salt draws out all the blood as it should. So first they wash the chicken. After that, they soak it in water for about half an hour. Now I’m ready to salt the chicken, but there’s another problem: it’s covered in water. This problem is especially common with turkeys. When you buy a turkey, it has a lot of membranes, so the kashrus team has to check them. Now it’s going to be salted. If the chicken is completely wet, the salt won’t stick to it. Take a chicken, put salt on it while it’s soaking wet, and the salt will dissolve immediately. And especially with turkeys, which have many membranes, you have to check very carefully that all the membranes have been torn, so that pockets of water don’t form inside the bird and prevent the salt from sticking. So after the chicken has soaked in water for half an hour, it goes into a drum—a round container like a large washing machine—where the chickens tumble around. The [unclear] of the chicken tumbles inside, the water comes off, and then it reaches the workers who salt it. Here, too, some kashrus authorities want the workers doing the salting to be G-d-fearing Jews, while others are satisfied with a non-Jew doing the salting as long as a mashgiach stands there and supervises it the whole time. Practices differ among kashrus authorities on this point. Today, when people buy chickens, generally ninety-five percent of the chickens sold are cut into breasts, drumsticks, and thighs rather than sold whole.

49:09 Speaker 2 Some kashrus authorities cut up the chicken before salting, and others do it afterward. What’s the advantage of each approach? When you open the chicken before salting, you can be sure, so to speak, that the salt reaches both sides properly. An opened chicken is like a flat piece: you put salt on top and underneath, and it’s done as it should be. On the other hand, there’s a drawback. What is it? Once the chicken is cut, its skin is no longer attached firmly. Naturally, when you cut up a chicken, the skin shifts, and sometimes it isn’t lying flat when you salt it. So first of all, there’s a question whether it has been salted on both sides, because if the skin isn’t attached to the meat, it would seem that you also have to put salt between the skin and the meat. The She’eiris Yehudah of the Alter Rebbe says that it’s all right. But sometimes you salt it while the skin is attached to the meat, and as the chicken continues along the salting table, the skin can shift to the side. It then turns out that you salted only one side, which, according to the Rema, is not kosher. On the other hand, if you salt the chicken whole, you don’t have that problem: the skin hasn’t been torn, so the salting is done properly. But then you might say, “I can’t see whether the salt reached the inside properly. I can only see the outside.” So if you have skilled workers who really do put salt inside properly, salting a whole chicken addresses both concerns: there is salt on the inside, and there’s no possibility that you salted over the skin only for the skin to move aside midway through, leaving it salted on just one side—which would not be kosher according to the Rema.

51:19 Speaker 2 The chicken stays in its salt for a full hour. Some say a third of an hour is enough; the stringency is to leave it for an hour, following the Rema. In practice, at slaughterhouses the chicken generally stays salted for about an hour and ten minutes. After the chicken is slaughtered, the workers doing the salting place it on a table with a conveyor belt. The belt moves slowly, slowly, until the hour and ten minutes are up. Why an hour and ten minutes? Because sometimes the workers may push a chicken a little farther ahead, so if the belt’s journey took exactly an hour, that chicken wouldn’t spend a full hour on it. That’s why they make it an hour and ten minutes or more: even if a chicken is pushed a little ahead, it will still have at least an hour. Although, from a halachic standpoint, even a third of an hour would be kosher. Then the chicken falls off the conveyor belt onto a lower surface. The impact is what halachah calls shaking off the salt. In some places they also use a round drum, like the washing-machine drum used before salting, whose job was to make the chicken drier so the salt would stick. Here, the drum’s job is to clean the salt off thoroughly, because salt must not remain on the chicken. Then they dip the chicken into three pools of water. That can be done in just a second—simply lifting the chicken and placing it in the water. Today it goes into a long chiller, where it passes through three stages, and at that point its kashrus processing is complete. The other mashgichim must now make sure it is packaged with the kashrus seal and that, G-d forbid, the non-kosher chickens don’t get mixed up with the kosher ones. Generally, every slaughterhouse has three categories of chickens. There are the kosher ones, sold with the slaughterhouse’s kashrus seal. There are the treif ones—healthy birds that have kashrus problems—which are sold as

53:37 Speaker 2 treif. That’s a matter in its own right: the slaughterhouse’s rabbinic authorities have to make sure these birds don’t, G-d forbid, find their way to Jewish consumers, and that they are sold to non-Jews who buy non-kosher meat. And there are birds or parts that aren’t fit to eat. Some are rejected by the shochet and some by the veterinarian present at every slaughterhouse. These are called waste: they’re ground up and thrown in the trash. Let’s say a few words about the internal organs; we’re nearly finished. Let’s turn briefly to liver. At ordinary slaughterhouses it’s generally sold as is. Now I want to explain the halachah of liver. Meat that hasn’t been kashered—that is, hasn’t been salted—whether it’s liver or another kind of meat: if someone buys kosher meat that hasn’t been kashered, then to remove the blood before eating it, he obviously can’t cook it, either in a pan or in a baking tray in the oven. He has to roast it over a fire to draw out the blood inside the meat. We have two ways of doing that: either salt it, so the salt draws the blood out of the meat, or place it over a fire, so the fire draws the blood out and the meat is free of blood. How do we do that, practically speaking, nowadays? You can roast it on a barbecue, or you can do it another way. Again, I’m talking about roasting meat that hasn’t been kashered. If someone roasts meat that has been kashered, none of these laws apply. You can cook kashered meat, roast it, or do whatever you want with it. Right now I’m talking about meat that hasn’t been kashered. Liver, for example, cannot be salted; it has to be roasted over a fire. How do you prepare

55:52 Speaker 2 liver to eat? First, you have to wash it thoroughly so there are no stains on it—bloodstains, as you may remember. We spoke earlier about chicken: before salting it, you have to wash off any blood on the outside. It’s the same here. Before a person roasts liver, he has to wash off any blood on it. Then he cuts a crisscross pattern into it or makes holes in it, and places it over the fire with the cuts or holes facing downward toward the fire, to help the blood drain out. Before that, according to the Rema, you should sprinkle on a little coarse salt shortly before roasting it. Then you roast it thoroughly, and it can be eaten. According to the Rema, you have to wash it with water after roasting, and then it’s ready to eat. Now, if meat hasn’t been salted for three days—seventy-two hours—then after you roast it, you cannot cook it. In other words, when you buy raw liver, meaning it hasn’t been baked or roasted over a fire, then after roasting it, it’s kosher to eat. You can also cook it afterward, put it in a pot with all sorts of other things. There’s no problem. But if that meat, that liver, hasn’t been salted for three days, then even after you’ve roasted it over a fire, you cannot cook it. Therefore, according to some halachic authorities, you may not leave liver or unsalted meat for three days, out of concern that someone might cook it after roasting it. What do you do to solve this problem? If you put

58:12 Speaker 2 If you pour water over meat that has not been koshered, or over liver, within seventy-two hours of slaughter, you count another seventy-two hours minus one hour from then. If you roast it within that time, you can then cook it. Now, when someone buys raw liver, he needs to look at it. First of all, the date of slaughter is printed on it, and usually the time of slaughter is printed on it too. So if he buys fresh liver, he knows: “I bought this this morning. It says this liver came from a turkey that was slaughtered—poultry that was slaughtered yesterday.” So I need to roast it over a fire within seventy-two hours. If I haven’t roasted it within seventy-two hours, I have a solution: pour water over it—simply put it under the tap for one minute—and from the moment I poured water over it, I have another seventy-one hours. If I haven’t done it within those seventy-one hours, it’s already not healthy for the turkey—for the liver; the meat will spoil. But I can do it again, pour water over it and count seventy hours, and so on. If I bought frozen liver, it’s generally reasonable to assume it was frozen on the day it was slaughtered. There is also a dispute about whether freezing means I count seventy-two hours from when it thaws or not, but that’s not the point. Some hold that if I froze the liver, then the moment I thaw it, I begin counting the seventy-two hours, or at least seventy-one hours. Others say no, freezing doesn’t help; even while it’s frozen, I have to count seventy-two hours from slaughter. And if I froze it, this is usually liver sold later—it isn’t sold within three days—and then, according to some opinions,

1:00:24 Speaker 2 it cannot be eaten at all, because meat that has not been koshered is not left for more than seventy-two hours. A few more halachos concerning the koshering of liver. You can roast liver over an actual fire, on a barbecue, and you can also roast it in an oven. How? If I have a rack set aside for this, that rack will become treif afterward. I can’t later put challah or bread or anything like that on it. The rack will become treif, but to keep it from making the bottom of my oven treif, I need to put a disposable pan on the oven floor. Why would it make it treif? Because blood drips from the liver, and that blood is completely treif. So if I open the oven, put a disposable pan on its floor, and I have a rack set aside for livers and put the liver on it, it’s preferable to leave the oven slightly open. Then, from a halachic standpoint, the vapors can escape, and I can roast the livers in the oven without any halachic concern. Back to our subject: today in Israel it is difficult to find meat that has not been koshered; there is almost none. Even meat slaughtered abroad, under the regulations of the Chief Rabbinate, which does holy work—the Rabbinate makes sure that imported meat is koshered. Some of it is glatt and some is not, but it has been koshered. What generally is not koshered here is liver. Hearts are not koshered either, nor are turkey testicles, for those who buy them. Usually spleen is koshered, and turkey gizzards are koshered too. For those who eat them, the gizzards and spleens from turkeys bought in the supermarket have been koshered. I want to make one more small point about liver for anyone buying frozen liver. According to halacha, if someone soaks something in cold blood,

1:02:54 Speaker 2 if a person cooks meat with blood, the meat becomes treif. If someone takes a vessel of blood and puts a chicken in it, the blood is treif. But if you put a chicken in it, you can wash the chicken and there is no problem. If, however, the chicken sits in that blood for more than twenty-four hours, it is considered soaked in the blood. After more than twenty-four hours it is considered “pickled,” and pickling is like cooking, so that meat becomes treif. Take milk, for example. You have a tray in the refrigerator with cooked chicken, baked chicken or raw chicken, and milk drips onto it. If you see right away that milk has dripped on it, you can take out the chicken, rinse it under the tap, and the chicken is kosher even to begin with. You don’t need to peel anything off or do anything else. But if the chicken is in a bowl and milk drips onto it, and the milk remains in that bowl so that the chicken sits in it for more than twenty-four hours, it is as though you cooked the chicken with milk. Twenty-four hours with milk, even when it is cold, is like cooking: pickling is like cooking. So that chicken is not kosher. The same applies to liver. Liver has a lot of blood in it, so it cannot be koshered with salt, because the salt will not draw all the blood out of it as it does with other meat. So what is the problem? If I take raw, fresh liver that isn’t frozen, blood keeps draining from the liver into the tray I bought it in—even more so with hearts. So when you buy a tray of fresh liver, check that the tray is made of absorbent cardboard or absorbent foam. Then the liver is not sitting in blood, and the liver is fit for roasting. But if you buy it in a cardbo—on a plastic tray, or you go to the supermarket butcher counter that sells fresh meat and the butcher gives it to you

1:05:29 Speaker 2 on a plastic tray, the liver continues to release blood. You take it home in that plastic tray and leave it there for more than twenty-four hours. You’ve made the liver treif; you can no longer roast it. It is as though you cooked the liver with blood, so it is no longer kosher, just as if you had cooked the liver with milk. What’s more, this generally happens at supermarket butcher counters. Supermarket butcher counters do not buy livers or hearts from slaughterhouses in foam trays; they buy them in bags. There are slaughterhouses supervised by rabbis who are very particular, and they make sure that the bags containing two or three kilos of liver, supplied commercially to butcher counters, have absorbent cardboard or paper inside to soak up the blood. In that case, those livers generally are not treif. But when you buy this liver, the liver is supposed to be kosher. The slaughterhouse—generally, the slaughterhouses here are all kosher without any concern. But the bag of liver that reaches the butcher counter may well have been there for more than twenty-four hours from the time it was packed at the slaughterhouse until the butcher opened it. There is blood in that bag, and if there is no absorbent paper, those livers are completely treif. So you need to pay attention when buying fresh raw liver. This generally does not arise with frozen liver, because it was frozen and therefore the liver is not sitting in blood. If you buy fresh liver, check that the slaughterhouse packed it in foam, not plastic. I’ll repeat this about liver or hearts. With hearts, you need to cut them open and remove the membrane covering the heart. I won’t talk about hearts, because they are not commonly encountered, but liver is very common. Be very careful about koshering it.

1:07:43 Speaker 2 Be very particular about how it is koshered.