A New Way to Make Homemade Dog Food!

I've been making homemade dog food for about four years now, and at this point, I have a system that works really well. But I keep seeing this new meal prep trend where people are freezing full meals into these super cubes, and honestly, it's got me jealous. Gosh, they're so clean and organized. And now it's got me wondering if this could be translated to homemade dog food, if the portions would even make sense for a dog, and if this actually simplifies anything or just adds another step that I don't need. So I'm gonna make three different homemade dog food recipes, beef, turkey, and lamb, freeze them into super cubes, and see if this trend actually makes sense for pet parents or not. One of the craziest statistics I have ever heard is that 95% of homemade pet food recipes online, even the ones developed by veterinarians, are missing at least one major nutrient. And that's exactly what we would do when we would throw together random plates of meats and fruits and vegetables, hoping it was somewhere close to balance. This is missing at least four or five major nutrients and cheese on the plate. So now we only use recipes that are complete and balanced and optimized for adult dogs, not all life stages. Now, for our beef recipe, to a large pot, we're adding 85-15 ground beef, sweet potatoes, and beef liver that we blend together in a food processor first. Our dogs are a little bit picky, so we try to get everything as ground up as possible. Then we're adding chicken eggs without the shell, frozen spinach, as well as our supplements. And we're going in with nutritional yeast for B vitamins, hemp seeds for manganese, calcium carbonate powder, bone meal powder for calcium and phosphorus, vitamin E liquid, choline capsules, sea salt that is non-iodized. This is mainly for chloride, which is essential for dogs, as well as zinc capsules, cod liver oil with added vitamin A and D, and kelp powder for iodine. Now, I know this seems like a lot, but these supplements only take up about three to 4% of the entire recipe, and we add them in just to ensure that our dogs don't run into any nutrient deficiencies. And then, because we added those dry powders, we like to add some water in to help mix it all up and not burn, ideally. For our turkey recipe, to a large pot, we're adding 93-7 ground turkey, the same sweet potato and beef liver blend from the beef recipe, spinach, egg yolks, because we just need more concentrated sources of choline. We don't need the whole egg. And a very similar blend of supplements. And for our lamb recipe, to another large pot, we're adding 85-15 ground lamb, the same sweet potato and beef liver mixture we've been using this whole time, chicken eggs, but no shell, spinach, and that same supplement blend to help balance everything out. All of the pots of food get put on the stove at like medium to medium-low heat for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. Now, with all of these recipes, we're not looking to get anything crispy. We don't wanna cook anything on high heat, so I'm gonna keep stirring and checking the bottom to make sure nothing burns, and I'm on like medium-low heat, maybe a little closer to medium right now. While those are cooking, we need to prepare our grains. And I know what some of you are thinking. But Bryce, grains are just cheap fillers that don't do anything for dogs. And I hear you. I used to believe the exact same thing. Then I realized that grains are actually used to ensure dog food doesn't get too high in protein, which can make kidney issues worse, too high in fat, which can cause pancreatitis, or too high in fiber, which can mess with your dog's poops. So in all three of these recipes, we're using both white rice and barley. Plus, using grains when you make homemade food makes it safer and cheaper for you. Okay, real quick, and this is not an ad of any kind, I just wanted to let you know that if you want to make recipes like this for your dog at home, we have a recipe that we will give you completely for free. All you have to do is click the link in the description down below, sign up for our email list, and we'll get this sent over immediately. Okay, back to the cook. When we make these recipes, they end up making seven days' worth of food for whatever pound dog you choose. So we chose the 40-pound recipe. We now have seven days' worth of food for that 40-pound dog. And ideally, we will be able to fit one day in each of these. I don't know if that will work out or not. And you might be watching this wondering, well, how do we make sure each day is the exact same as the other? And with adult dogs, we don't really have to worry about every single day being perfect. As long as we make a week's worth of food and they get all of this balanced food within those seven days, they'll be getting all the nutrients that they need. I'm not gonna lie, that turned out quite perfectly. Now, you'll notice at the end here, I don't have any cooking liquid left over. If you did have liquid in there, you would just want to make sure that gets into all of the food because there's a lot of nutrients in that cooking liquid. As you can see, this one was a little bit short, a little bit smaller than the others. So I'm not gonna worry too much about it. What I'm gonna do is find the one with the most in it, skim a little bit off the top and make them a bit more even. Okay, so that's seven days worth of food. One day fit in each one pretty much perfectly. Now, this is for a 40 pound dog. As you can tell, if you go much more than this, you're probably gonna need to do one cube per meal if you eat twice a day versus one cube per day. So what I'm gonna do is put the other two recipes into super cubes, get all these covered up and frozen overnight, and then we'll come back tomorrow and see how it actually is to feed our dogs and see if it's a pain to deal with or if it makes things easier. That is heavy. Whoa, wow. It's now been two days. Do I need gloves to do this? What the hell? Okay, I'm gonna do all these. This is obviously very fun and satisfying, but the part I'm a little bit concerned about is actually defrosting these and feeding them because usually I just have them in a Ziploc bag, I throw them in some hot water, let them defrost for a little, and then feed them. I recognize that's probably not the safest or most scientifically backed method. And honestly, I'm thinking I'm probably gonna do the same thing with these. I don't really wanna microwave it because I'm afraid that's gonna cook it more and result in more nutrient loss than I originally intended in these recipes. And I don't really wanna put it in hot water, although I could, that just might add a bunch of extra liquid and take a while. The hot water is not gonna work because it's just gonna take way too much water and way too much time. So I'm gonna stick with the food in a Ziploc bag submerged in water method. If you wanna go the safe route, use the safe science-backed cold water method. Do as we say, not as we do kind of thing, you know what I mean? I honestly was hoping that I wouldn't have to use Ziploc bags with this method. I don't really know what I was hoping I would use. I don't know what I thought the alternative would be. It does seem like you kind of have to do the same process that we usually do, cook the food, portion it into bags, then defrost it in those bags. Plus you have to freeze it in the super cubes. So honestly, I think this is adding a bit of an unnecessary step into the process, even though it looks really cool. But if you're watching this being like, oh my gosh, you should have done this to make it way easier, let me know in the comments because I really like how all this looks. It just was harder and a bit more work than it usually is. I think there's a way to make this work. This just isn't quite it yet. Okay, look at how perfectly that fits in there. That's insane. You see this? So while the super cubes look amazing, they definitely add an extra step to our usual process. But if you wanna try making homemade dog food without the fancy freezing method, remember that we have that free recipe down in the description below. And if you're wondering why we cook our dog food instead of feeding it raw, I made an entire video explaining that decision, which you can watch right here.