Chicken Mummy - Part 1

Since we are doing Story of  the World Ancients, we just HAD to do the chicken mummy project that goes along with ancient Egypt. I've been told that this is a rite of passage for a homeschooler. Many homeschoolers are afraid to try it. I'm not so squeamish about working with chicken, so I decided to give this project a try. Is Tornado Boy learning much from it? Probably not. But we can say "We did the chicken mummy!" Maybe we need a T-shirt...

First, we assembled the ingredients... Chicken, check... Salt, check... Baking soda, check... Baking powder, check... Random spices to make it smell better, check. Now the Activity Guide suggests getting 3 boxes each of baking soda and baking powder, but it just says "several boxes" of salt, which really isn't helpful. I got 6 boxes. I needed more. I got more at Sam's the next week. Thankfully, you don't use it all at once, so the initial purchase got us through the first week of mummifying.

Next, we put our food service gloves on...

Then we washed the chicken first with water, then with rubbing alcohol (not pictured in our list of ingredients above - oops). I've since heard that some people soak their chicken in a rubbing alcohol/water mixture for a few hours. We just dumped most of a bottle over the chicken and inside the chicken and rinsed it out really well. Seems to have worked ok. After washing and sterilizing the chicken, you then dry it with lots of paper towels.

Here's our nice, clean chicken, ready to get really dried out!

Now time to mix our ingredients...

Then stuff the chicken with salt mixture...

Now stick it in a bag, add salt mixture, and then put that bag inside a bag...

We change the salt now and then, more often in the beginning. I have since transferred the chicken to a BOWL with a plastic lid (air tight), and I think that will work better than the bag, which the chicken barely fit in.

So there's the start of our chicken mummy!