When you think of homemade dog food, you probably think of moist food. While most recipes are for moist diets, there are also homemade dog food recipes available for dry kibble. The one I've chosen to share today uses ground turkey as a protein source, but you can substitute any protein source of your choosing.
Many dry kibble diets are made with highly processed ingredients. There are often recalls on these products because of these types of ingredients. Because commercial kibble is typically made in extremely large batches, it's often difficult to perform strict quality control.
Where are the ingredients sourced from? What are the company's quality control standards? Usually you can't even find this information on the company's website. You have to contact them directly to get the answers.
You can save yourself a lot of time and hassle by making your own dry dog food at home. You'll be in complete control of the ingredients used, and you can cater the kibble to your dog's specific dietary needs. For example, you can add supplements that your veterinarian recommends right into your pet's daily meals.
MORE RECIPES HERE: Homemade Dog Food & Treats Recipes
Ground Turkey and Lentil Dry Dog Food Recipe
Ingredients
- 5 cups water
- 1 cup of water
- 1 cup uncooked brown rice
- 1/2 cup lentils
- 3 medium carrots – chopped
- 1 medium sweet potato – chopped
- 1 large apple – cored and chopped
- 3/4 cup steel-cut oats
- 1 tablespoon dried parsley
- 1 tablespoon dried rosemary
- 1 pound ground turkey
- 1/4 cup olive oil (you could also use canola oil or sunflower oil)
Directions
This recipe is a bit more complicated than some of the others I have shared. While there may be a lot of steps, it's not difficult, so just bear with me.
First, in a medium saucepan you'll need to add the 5 cups of water, rice and lentils. Cover and bring this mixture to a boil, and then reduce the heat to low and cook for 20 minutes.
When the lentils and rice are cooked, you're going to add the additional cup of water, chopped carrots, chopped sweet potato, chopped apple, oats, parsley and rosemary. Again, you'll need to cover it and bring this mixture to a boil. Let it cook for an additional 20 minutes.
Preheat your oven to 350°.
While the mixture is simmering on the stove top, brown the ground turkey in a frying pan. You'll have to keep a close eye on it. Since turkey is a very lean meat it will stick to the pan easily if you don't stir it frequently.
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Now that you've cooked the turkey and your rice, lentil and herb mixture is finished cooking, it's time to combine all of your ingredients. First, sufficiently grease two cookie sheets. Then, in a food processor or blender, you're going to puree the ingredients.
As you'll see in my video guide above, I used a blender and I pureed half of the ingredients at a time. You'll likely need to do the same, unless you have a very large blender.
Add half of the oil, half of the ground beef and half of the lentil and rice mixture to the blender. Puree the ingredients. Dump this half of the mixture onto one of the well-greased cookie sheets and spread it out evenly. Do the same thing with the other half of the ingredients and spread them onto the second cookie sheet.
Cook the dog food in your 350° oven for about 1 hour. At this point the kibble will have dried out quite a bit, so you should be able to flip it over. I usually cut each sheet in half with a pizza cutter and then flip the smaller halves. Now, cook it for another hour.
After the second hour, you can use the pizza cutter to cut the sheets into small squares about 1/2″ x 1/2″. This will make your small pieces of kibble. If you have a teacup or very small breed, you may want to cut the kibble even small than that.
Once you've cut both sheets into small-sized kibble, reduce the heat of your oven to 325° and bake the kibble for another 1-1.5 hours. This will completely dry it out. The drier the better in this case, because your homemade dog food does not have preservatives, so drying it out completely will allow it to last longer before going bad.
Once the kibble has cooled, you can feed it to your pet or prepare it for storage. You can store this dog food in an airtight container in the refrigerator for 5-7 days or freeze the kibble for storage of up to 3 months.
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