Chip and Cleo, our geriatric miniature schnauzers, have a really great life with us. Although they are both near 100 in doggie years, they still bounce around like puppies. With over an acre of fenced yard to run and play in, a relatively stress-free life, and homemade dogfood, we attribute their good health to their honeyboomer lifestyle. We supplement their morning meal with Zesty Paws Senior Advanced 11-in-1 Bites.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, one of Aron’s many interests is gourmet cooking. He has cooked Chip and Cleo’s food for years and taught me the recipe. Yesterday we worked together to cook approximately 50 pounds of dog food. Yes, that sounds like a lot for such little dogs! It’s actually enough to feed them for nearly two months.

The Recipe

Many recipes for homemade dog food exist, and in my opinion, almost ANY homemade dog food is better than store-bought traditional dog food. Our recipe is simple—just equal parts of four ingredients. For  approximately 50 pounds of dog food, we used the following amounts:

1. 12 lbs Ground beef and/or a combination of ground beef and ground pork
2. 12 lbs Ground chicken breasts
3. 1.5 lbs Brown rice (12 cups of water and 6 cups of rice)
4. 12 lbs Mixed vegetables

Due to the cost, we generally try to find the ground beef/pork on sale, and we try to buy 80/20 or better. We get the chicken breasts on sale, and grind them in our meat grinder. We look for the biggest bags of frozen mixed vegetables that we can find.

We have chosen to use brown rice over white, since it adds more fiber and contains fewer additives than white rice (dogsmart.com).

The Cost

We figured the total cost for our 50 pounds of dog food to be $130, about $1.39 per meal per dog. We feed our schnauzers ½ cup each in the morning and at dinner time. We found chicken breasts on sale for $2.99 a pound but paid closer to $5.00 a pound for the ground beef/pork because Kroger seemed to have sold out their sale meat by the time we got there yesterday. Finding the ingredients on sale will certainly reduce the cost. We procrastinated and paid the price so that our dogs could have breakfast today.

UPDATE: We just made a new batch of dog food (11/18/2023), and let me tell you that shopping for sales makes a HUGE difference. This time we figured the cost at $.38 per serving instead of $1.39!! We found chicken breasts at $1.99/lb and ground beef at $2.40 a pound at Kroger–made a BIG difference!!!

The Process

Making your own dog food is not rocket science. It does take several big pots (5-7 gallons each) if you make 50 pounds at once!

1. Cooking. Since the brown rice takes the longest to cook (about 45 minutes), we start that first. The vegetables need to be really soft for our toothless dogs to eat, so those go on next. We throw the ground beef and pork into one pot together, and get that all started before we begin grinding the chicken. With two of us working on it, it took about an hour to get everything cooked.
2. Cooling Down. Once everything is cooked, we mix the rice with the ground beef/pork so that the rice can absorb the water (fat, grease) from the meat, and then turn off all the burners and let everything cool down for an hour or so. That gives us a needed rest break!!
3. Mixing. The next step is to drain the water from the mixed vegetables and from the chicken. We then mix all of the ingredients together.
4. Packaging. The final step is to spoon the dog food into gallon freezer bags—we use 1-cup measuring cups. We put about 9 cups into each bag, which ends up being about 5 pounds per bag. We filled 10 bags this time, which we freeze until needed.

Chip and Cleo hang out in the kitchen with us while we are fixing their dog food. They know they will get a small sample when it’s all done.