Adventures in Homemade Dog Food

For the last 3 years we've been struggling with our dog Kodi. Kodi is a German Shepherd, and ever since we brought his precious self home, he's had skin issues. Primarily, it's a yeast imbalance and nothing we've done so far has helped. We've tried CADI shots, probiotics, changes in diet, anti-biotics, oil, you name it. What we have not yet tried is making raw dog food.

So in this post, I'm going to show you our first time grinding up a big batch.

Ingredients

Ingredients:

• 1 lb beef stew meat
• 1 lb ground beef (23% fat)
• 1.5 lb turkey necks
• 3.5 lb chicken thighs
• 1 bag of spinach (gently steamed)
• 1/2 bag of kale (gently steamed)

For this process, we're using the brand new attachment I got for our stand mixer. This this is a great workhorse and did a great job.

All of our ingredients assembled, we ran the entire lot through the meat grinder, spacing out the different ingredients so we had a nice blend. We did run into some issues with the turkey necks. The bone structure and size of the neck tends to get jammed in the blade. We had to clean out the grinder several times.

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Final product

​This entire process took a little over an hour, and we ended up with 7 pounds of dog food. This is obviously not a huge amount for such a large dog such as Kodi. We are going to try giving him a pound a day and see how he handles it and give us time to figure out how to source all of our meat. This is also not the final recipe. What is missing is organ meat, but we're not ready to throw that at him just yet. We're sticking with meats he's familiar with first and then we'll ramp up to the full recipe.

If he ends up needing the 2 pound meal as every calculator I've run across claims, we're definitely going to need to work on sourcing! Already, though, just cutting out kibble from his diet seems to be changing his system. The yeasty smell is going down and he's not chewing himself all the time.

​For a first try, though, not bad! The final product looks and smells like sausage. I'd make meatballs out of it if it didn't have all those bones in it.

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