low starch grain free homemade raw food recipe for dogs · 4"12/2014! foodpreparationday:$! 1....

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Low starch, grain-‐free Homemade raw dog food recipe

Find the entire post here online: http://www.bullterrierfun.com/low-‐starch-‐grain-‐free-‐raw-‐food-‐recipe-‐for-‐dogs/ The amounts below deliver enough food for about 45 servings/ days for a 50 lb dog. Preparing a batch for 1 1/2 months will take a few hours and require a fair amount of kitchen utensils, as well as enough storage space in your freezer. Keep that in mind.

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What you need: Non-‐Food

• Grinder I highly recommend the Weston No.8 575 Watt heavy duty meat grinder

• Cooking pots, Buckets and bowls

Make sure you have some large cooking pots at home for the veggies. Otherwise cooking them all will take forever.You should also have some 5 Gallon or larger buckets and/or bowls in the house to keep and mix your ingredients in.

• Your hands to mix or some really huge wooden spoons or sticks to mix everything

• Kitchen scale • Sealable plastic freezer bags (I use 1 quart bags for 1.3 lb of food for one

day, which works just fine. If you bag a larger amount of food you should choose bigger bags)

• A table spoon to fill the bags.

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Food • 30-‐31 lb Bottom flat meat (makes for 50% of the batch, 0 calcium) If you

get lean pieces, you do not need to trim the fat • 10-‐11 lb chicken hearts and beef liver (makes for 15-‐17% of the batch,

almost no calcium) (every now and then you should replace the liver by another organ in order to avoid overdosing of vitamin A. Also if your dog does not tolerate chicken, of course you should substitute the chicken hearts. A very valuable substitution for dogs is green tripe for example.)

• 18 lb of veggies (makes for 30% of the batch, 4225 mg of calcium)

8 lb carrots (1500 mg calcium) 4 lb broccoli (2000 mg calcium) 3 Bags of split dried green peas (725 mg calcium) > makes ≈ 6 lb when cooked to mush

• 24 eggs ≈ 3 lb (yolk delivers ≈ 1050 mg calcium, 24 egg shells deliver ≈

58,000 mg calcium) Other ingredients

• 1/2 garlic bulb (in small amounts just as for humans garlic is very beneficial for dogs)

• Limestone powder or another Calcium additive (calculation describes below)

Other healthy add-‐ons • ≈ 15 Fl. oz. (= 450 ml) Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV) with MOTHER!!!! = 2tsp. =

10 ml for a 50 lb dog/ day (I will soon write an article about ACV. For now please look the benefits up on the Internet)

Preparing the batch: Previous day: Soak the dried peas over night, wash and cook them the next day. Why am I using dried peas? Simple! they are just a lot less expensive than their fresh or frozen versions, bust just as good.


Food preparation day:

1. Calculate the amount of calcium needed. Calculate the amount of daily food to be bagged.Make sure there is enough space in your freezer for 45 freezer bags with food or roughly 60 lb. Find a place for your dog, so he won’t steal. :)

2. Let the peas cook until they have absorbed the water and have turned into pea mush.

3. Cut or break the veggies into rough chunks and cook them until they are ready to be mixed into a food mush. They do not have to fall apart, but should be soft enough for you to squeeze and split them with your fingers to make your mix. Use as few water as possible to help prevent the vitamins from washing out. Let all of your veggies cool.

4. Crack the eggs and mix them in a bowl. Wash the shells and grind them in a porcelain mortar or a coffee grinder. Peel the garlic and mince it. Weigh the remaining amount of limestone powder Mix the eggs, powdered shells, garlic, the weighed limestone powder and other add-‐ons, if you use them, such as ACV.

5. Grind the liver

6. Mix the soft veggies with your egg-‐premix and the ground liver. This is the most disgusting part in the otherwise pretty appealing process of the food preparation. The liver almost becomes a viscous mass that does not smell too good. Premixing it into the eggs and veggies helps to take away the odor and feel of it. Oh, did I already mention it: I mix with my bare hands :) Put on plastic gloves, if you do not like the feeling.

7. Grind the meat and the chicken hearts (can be mixed already)

8. Now combine your egg-‐egg shell-‐veggie-‐calcium-‐garlic-‐liver mix with your meat-‐chicken heart mix to an even dough-‐like mix. Do that very carefully to distribute all ingredients evenly in the mix.

9. Now you are ready to fill your freezer bags. Use your kitchen scale and the spoon to bag the daily amount you have calculated before.

Your Bull Terrier will just looooooove his food! To feed it, take it out of the freezer and let it thaw at room temperature for a few hours. The flat bags do not take too long. Feed one half of the bag in the morning and one in the evening. Add yogurt, vitamins, fish oil or other additives as needed to the single servings


I also recommend these products as add-‐ons:

• Nutri-‐Pet NUPRO Dog Supplement 5lb • Bragg Apple Cider Vinegar • Grizzly Salmon Oil

How much does it cost to feed my 50 lb dog raw? This is only a sample calculation based on the food prices in 2014 in SW Florida. $122.-‐ 30.5 lb Bottom flat meat (at BJ’s with BJ membership card, 3.99/lb) $17.-‐ 10.5 lb chicken hearts/ liver (at Walmart) $7.60 8 lb carrots (at BJ’s) $8.-‐ 4 lb broccoli (at BJ’s) $3.25 3 Bags of split dried green peas $3.25 24 eggs (at BJ’s) ≈ $2 1/2 garlic bulb, limestone powder (add $3.-‐ for 1/2 bottle ACV (with mother!) if you use that) ______________________________________________________________ ≈ $3.60/ day (without added vitamins, yogurt and fish oil) ≈ $110/ month

Calculation of daily raw food intake This is measured in percentage of body weight. Note: this is a calculation for RAW food, not kibble! Also these values are only for reference. Please adjust the daily amount depending on your dogs situation and condition. Just like humans, very active dogs may require more food than the average dog.

• 2% of bodyweight for overweight dogs • 2.5% -‐ 3% to maintain the current weight • More % to fatten a skinny dog

Please talk to your vet, if you intend to feed your puppy a raw diet. Puppies have special needs and require up to 10% of body their weight in food each day.


Mila weighs ≈ 50 lb. She has an average level of activity with some more active days sprinkled in. She also gets her homemade treats and a daily amount of yogurt, salmon oil and vitamin supplement. All of these aspects lead to a daily amount of 600 grams (≈ 1.3 lb) as the perfect amount of our raw dog food mix. Calcium If you do not feed bones to your dog or another source rich in calcium, you may want to supplement Calcium in your dog’s diet. Calcium is one of the most important minerals for a dog’s body, required in fairly high amounts and important for the bones, muscles, nerves and blood. In addition, the Calcium -‐ Phosphorous ratio is a very important parameter in the nutrition of your dog, because those two minerals work together in the skeletal system. While Phosphorous usually is automatically fed in sufficient amounts just by feeding meats in a raw diet, Calcium may need to be added to balance the ratio, which should be 1.2 -‐ 1.3 parts of Calcium per 1 part of Phosphorous. Both over and under supplementing can have health consequences for your dog. Therefore it is advisable to calculate the Calcium requirement of your own dog and supplement appropriately. The following calculation is intended only for reference. If insecure, please consult your vet to learn more about feeding the correct amount of Calcium. Calcium calculation Daily Calcium requirement by body weight*:

• 25 lb dog needs about 800-‐900 mg Calcium • 50 lb dog needs 1600-‐1750 mg Calcium • 75 lb dog needs about 2600-‐2700 mg Calcium

I use the egg shells from my recipe and powder them in a porcelain mortar (they should be ground to aid absorption). One egg shell weighs about 6-‐7 grams and contains about 37% Calcium. So from 24 egg shells I already have approx. 58,000 mg of Calcium. From the egg yolks come about 1050 mg. The Calcium from the bottom flat meat and the innards can be disregarded, because they contain only a minimum amount. My 18 lb of veggies deliver roughly 4225 mg of Calcium. So in my batch I already have 63,275 mg of Calcium.


My dog weighs 50 lb and I am making food for 45 days. That means I will need a total amount of 78,750 mg. That makes a difference of 15,475 mg of Calcium I need to supplement. Food grade limestone contains 75-‐90% available Calcium. That means I need to add 12.767 mg = 12.8 grams of food grade limestone. There are also other calcium sourced that can be added. *I have researched these values on the Internet. Please do your own research to confirm the correct amounts. I do not take over any responsibility for the values published in this recipe. However, if you figure out any attestable flaws in my calculation, please just let me know. I will be happy to adjust my recipe accordingly after reviewing your information.

low starch grain free homemade raw food recipe for dogs · 4"12/2014! foodpreparationday:$! 1....

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