Blog DIY Raw Meal for Dogs: Spooky Halloween Bowl Recipe
DIY Raw Meal for Dogs: Spooky Halloween Bowl Recipe
For those who like to fully take the reins on their journey to Truly Raw, we’ve partnered with a certified canine nutritionist to create our DIY Raw Recipes series. These meals incorporate our DIY Parts products and other raw ingredients and are step-by-step recipes that you can follow to ensure you’re feeding your pet a complete and well-balanced raw meal.
This recipe is balanced for All Life Stages to Nutritional Research Council (NRC) nutritional guidelines for dogs by our in-house certified canine nutritionist. This recipe is complete and balanced as it is written, and any ingredient changes or substitutions can affect the balance of the recipe.
Batch Recipe Ingredients:
- Carnos Duck Heads or Feet – 1,500g
- Carnos Green Tripe – 1,000g
- Carnos Turkey Hearts – 1,200g
- Carnos Boneless Pork – 600g
- Carnos Sardines – 600g
- Carnos Beef Liver – 180g
- Carnos Pork Brains – 300g
- Canned Oysters, in water – 220g
- Pumpkin, cooked or canned – 700g
- Hemp Seed Hearts, ground – 40g
- NOW Iron Bisglycinate, 18mg – 8 pills
- NOW Kelp powder – 5 scoops
- NOW Vitamin E dry capsules – 3 pills
Recipe total yield = 224 ounces = 14 pounds
Recipe calories per ounce = 44.7kcal/ounce
Recipe macronutrients = 14.3% protein, 10.6% fat, 1.7% carbohydrate
Required Prep Supplies:
- Meal containers
- Adequate freezer space
- Cutting board
- Knife
- Kitchen food scale
- Spice grinder
- Blender
How to calculate appropriate feeding amounts for your pet.
This is a very general guideline for calculating feeding amounts:
Adult dogs: 2% of bodyweight for inactive dogs, 2.5% of bodyweight for most average dogs, and 3-4% of bodyweight for highly active dogs.
Puppies: Puppies will typically start at 8-10% of bodyweight at 8-10 weeks of age. The percentage will slowly decrease as their weight/age increases. You want to feed enough that your puppy is not underweight, but not enough to make them chubby so take care to monitor their weight gain as they grow an adjust feeding amounts as necessary.
Example: A 45-pound healthy, average adult dog fed at 2.5% of their body weight should be fed 18 ounces of food per day.
*Every dog is an individual and their metabolism is unique to them. Feeding amounts should be adjusted as needed. If a dog is too thin and health issues have been ruled out, increase daily food. If a dog is too heavy and health conditions have been ruled out, decrease food within reason.
Meal Prep Instructions:
- Calculate how many days the recipe will last your dog. The batch can be doubled or tripled if desired. Set out the required amount of tupperware or bento boxes to hold meals. For example, if your dog eats approximately 1lb per day, the recipe as is would last 14 days, and you would need 14 containers that are large enough to hold 1 pound of food. Larger dogs will need larger containers and feeding amounts, while smaller dogs will need smaller containers and amounts.
- Thaw meat ingredients.
- Grind hemp seed hearts for optimal digestion in a spice grinder. Place in a bowl and add the powder supplements (open any capsules). Mix hemp powder and supplements thoroughly
- Measure out total amount of canned pumpkin. Slowly sprinkle and mix in the hemp/supplement powder.
- Portion out each ingredient as evenly as possible into the meal containers.
- Place 2-3 containers in the refrigerator and store the rest in the freezer. Remove 1 container from the freezer each day as 1 thawed container is used. Daily containers can be split into 2 meals per day if desired.
- An alternative prep method would be to use a grinder than can handle small meaty bones, and grind all ingredients together and mix thoroughly, then portion as needed. *Do not grind in sardines due to thiaminase. When making a ground batch, add the sardines whole at meal time.
Prepping Pro Tip: Use the total weight of ingredients rather than weighing each daily amount for each ingredient. In the example of prepping this recipe for 14 days, take the total grams of liver and divide into meal containers as equally as possible. No need to weigh ingredients individually for each day.
Nutritionist Tip: Brain is one of the only land based foods that contains the essential fatty acid DHA.