Recipes

DIY Raw Meal for Dogs: Turkey Bowl Recipe

March 2024

DIY Raw Meal for Dogs: Turkey 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. 

Canine Nutritionist Pro Tip: It is recommended to rotate recipes containing neck bones with recipes containing other meaty bones to avoid potential dietary hyperthyroidism due to residual thyroid hormones that may be left on necks.  

Batch Recipe Ingredients: 

• Carnos Boneless Ground Turkey – 600grams 
• Carnos Boneless Chicken, chunk or ground – 600g 
• Carnos Green Tripe, chunk or ground – 950g 
• Carnos Salmon, chunk or ground – 500g 
• Carnos Beef Liver Chunk – 200g 
• Carnos Beef Kidney Chunk – 500g 
• Carnos Chicken or Duck necks – 2,200g
• Canned Oysters, in water, drained – 200g 
• Cooked Carrots – 600g 
• Chia Seeds, ground – 40g 
• NOW Iron Bisglycinate, 18mg – 8 pills  
• NOW kelp powder – 5 scoops 
• NOW nutritional yeast – 10g 
• NOW vitamin E dry capsules – 2 pills 

Recipe Total Yield = 225 ounces or 14.1 pounds 

Recipe Calories per Ounce = 44.2kcal/ounce

Recipe Macronutrients = 14.86% protein, 9.02% fat, 1.81% 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: 

1. Calculate how many days the recipe will last for your dog based on how much they should be fed daily, according to the calculation instructions outlined above. This recipe batch can be doubled or tripled if you’d like to prep additional food and have the appropriate freezer storage space. Set out the required amount of air-tight storage containers to hold the 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.  

2. Grind chia seeds for optimal digestion in a spice grinder. Place in a bowl and add the powder supplements (open any capsules and dump the contents). Mix chia powder and supplements thoroughly. 

3. Thaw raw meat ingredients.  

4. It is recommended to lightly cook the carrots in advance of meal prep to make them more digestible. Lightly steaming vegetables allows for the cell walls to break down and enables our pets to better digest them, unlocking the most nutrient value. 

Pro Tip: Vegetables can be cooked in a large batch, frozen for storage, and thawed for meal prep.  

5. Blend the thawed, cooked carrots well. Slowly add the chia/supplement powder in with the carrots. Ensure all ingredients are mixed well. 

6. Portion out each ingredient as evenly as possible into the meal containers. 

7. Place 2-3 containers in the refrigerator and store the rest in the freezer. Remove 1 container from the freezer each day to thaw, as 1 pre-thawed container is used. Daily containers can be split into 2 meals per day if desired.  

8. An alternative prep method would be to use a grinder that can handle small meaty bones, and grind all ingredients together and mix thoroughly, then portion as needed.  

Prepping 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 200 grams of liver and cut into 14 pieces that are as equal as possible. Then distribute into meal containers. No need to weigh each piece of liver for each day.  

Nutritionist Tip: Green tripe is one of the few animal-based sources of the essential mineral manganese. While tripe is smelly, most dogs love it. If you are sensitive to strong smells, I recommend wearing gloves and using the ground tripe for easy portioning.