How To: Homemade Dog Food Made Easy - Alternative To Raw / B.A.R.F. Diet

Maybe your dog has allergy problems, digestive problems, or skin problems and are trying to correct those issues. Or...maybe you just want to feed your dog something healthier and more natural than commercial store bought dog foods which can be made with cheap ingredients or cooked at such a high temperature all the nutrients are cooked out of them.

Well today I have the solution for you, homemade dog food. I've tried the raw diets in the past as well as the B.A.R.F. diet. These are time consuming, expensive, some people worry about the choking hazard of bones, and to be quite honest it's kind of gross to prepare all those bloody meats for dogs. It actually wound up being a bit of a diet for myself as I'd be so gross from handling all those meats I would lose my own appetite.

This recipe only requires a few ingredients, is easy to prepare, and I won't lie it's a bit of a cleanup process but assuming you make a full month worth of dog food in one go and freeze it, it's not bad having to cleanup this one time.

This is my first time trying to prepare dog food so I looked at some receipes online and kind of put my own spin on it. In the future I would probably opt for fresh vegetables over frozen or canned but either can be used.

Ingredients:

1 Pound Ground Beef
2 Chicken Breasts
2 Cans Chicken Broth
1 Can Peas
1 Can Green Beans
2 Cups Brown Long Grain Rice
4 Cups Fresh/Frozen Broccoli
1 Cup Kale
2 Raw Eggs
2 Sweet Potatoes WIth Skin On

Supplies Needed:

1 Pot
1 Pan
1 Stock Pot
1 Skillet
1 Food Processor
4 Freezer Bags

*** Don't worry if you lack some of these items, you can still make this without a food processor, just either cut the ingrdients up finer or cool longer so it can be mashed. As far as pots. You really only need one pot, however to save on time and cook multiple things at the same time I used several pots, however everything could be done in one large stockpot ie rice first, then sweet potatoes and broth, etc. 

How To:

1. Brown the ground beef.
2. Boil brown rice til water is gone
3. In stock pot add chicken broth and a cup or two of water. Add sweet potatoes cubed into small cubes with skin on.
4. Boil 2 chicken breasts
5. Cut chicken breasts and add chicken breasts and ground beef to stock pot along with vegetables and rice. Bring to a rolling boil and then put on a simmer. Doesn't really need to be cooked as all ingredients are already cooked. The purpose of this is more to meld the flavors together and get themeats and borth into the vegetables to make them appealing to your pet.
6. Allow stock pot mixture to cool and put through a food processor. Don't chop it down to a paste, yet at the same time don't leave large chunks your dog can pick out the meat and leave veggies. You should be able to still make out some chucnks of sweet potatoe, meat and peas but not very much.
7. You can keep this one of two ways. YOu can make into 1 cup patties and bag individually or what I did was use 4 quart freezer bags, bag it up evenly, leave one out for this weeks feeding and freeze the rest to be defrosted later.


How Much To Feed:

I'm still playing around with this. Typically I would give my large 100 pound Bulldog 2 cups of food and my Chihuaha/Dachsund Mix one cup. I hear people online saying even one cup of homemade food may be more than enough. Dog food is light and airy and doesn't completely fill a cup. Because this food is very dense it takes up more volume of the cup and is packed with much more nutrients than store bought dog food. For this reason I'm feeding my bulldog just a little over a cup and my Chiweenie a little less than a cup. I'll see how they do and adjust from there.

YOu can follow my recipe here or do a bit of research on healthy non allergen foods and come up with your own recipes. This book below however I found to be helpful in giving me some background knolwedge on the types of foods I was looking to put into the food as well as the types of foods I wanted to avoid.