Please add any recipes for treats that your dogs love here. I bake these all the time for a bedtime biscuit. Hard to say if they work as my dog has always been a good sleeper anyway. We made some for next doors dog for the fireworks and they felt that they helped.
Recipe for Calming Camomile Biscuits
Camomile is reputed to have calming qualities so one of these tasty biscuits may help to calm an anxious or bouncy dog. They are also gluten free.
Ingredients:
80gs of Brown rice flour
80gs of Oat flour (you can just use plain oats but they need to be certified gluten free if this is a requirement)
1 camomile teabag/boiling water
1 tablespoon of dried parsley
1 tablespoon of dried mint
3 tablespoons of olive oil
To prepare, preheat an oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, 180 degrees Celsius .Add boiling water to the camomile teabag in a teacup. Combine the oat flour, brown rice flour, mint and parsley Add 3 tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil and the camomile tea a little at a time until you have a smooth dough. Roll the dough thinly (about 0.5 cms) and use a small cutter (about 5cms diameter) to cut the biscuits. Place them on a greased baking tray. Bake for about 25 minutes. Let the cookies cool on a wire rack and store them in an airtight tin for up to four weeks.
the following link is to a facebook album with photos of lights (lung) being dehydrated… NB not for the squeamish.
I buy the lights from my local butcher for a very good price, cut up and put in the dehydrator (Andrew James digital from Amazon but there are otehrs from other sources). it is then dried using warm air at 70C for up to 16 hours. It doesn’t smell during drying.
Hi, there
My first post!
I also bought a food dehydrator as another way to store my home grown fruit and veg, and to give the kids healthy treats instead of sweets.
Then I thought of drying meat as training treats for my very fussy Jack Russell x. Lo and behold, I found a treat that he loves ;D
I am a groomer, and hit on the idea of trying my clients with the treats, and have not found a dog yet who will not eat them. In fact, I gave away lots in little bags as healthy Xmas treats for my regulars.
Now I have re-homed a young Labradoodle, the dehydrator is on almost constantly!
I have dried most meats and offals, and all seem to go down well, but I have found that if I dry them just to a’ leathery’ texture rather than completely dry and crispy, the fussier dogs prefer them and they work great as ‘high-value’ training treats. The dogs really do ‘roll-over’ for them! : They don’t keep as long as the crispy ones once exposed to the air, but still for a week or two. I bought a small vacuum sealer and pack them into small bags that are easy to carry around and store indefinitely.
Now all the dogs on our regular walks come straight to my right coat pocket!
I find lamb liver best for the smallest and/or fussiest dogs, but they all seem to love kidney, heart , chicken and fish too. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), steak was the least sought after. ??? Lights I haven’t tried as we don’t have a local butcher where I live. (probably the only thing I really miss since moving from a town).
If anyone has any other ideas for the dehydrator, I would love to know.
Thank you for posting about your dehydrator and home made treats. I can see this machine as being very useful, in particular for making training treats as they are low calorie as well as nutritious.
Thanks for your reply, Dottie. Just seen your other thread about feeding treats and that someone else bought a dehydrator, so will hop off over there to tell her all about it!
Just found this old thread, but loved looking through all the recipes! I will have to try them sometime
Here’s one that I wanted to share - my friend wrote the recipe and my pups can’t get enough of it!
Banana Nut Dog Biscuit Recipe: https://www.petdoors.com/blog/6-dog-cookie-recipes/
I thought I would post this basic recipe for meaty dog treats that I use constantly. The good thing about it is that it can be customised in a lot of different ways, changing the meat and the flour (you can use oatmeal, quinoa flour, tapioca, rice flour) or adding other ingredients. So it’s up to you to make it gluten free, grain free or not.
The following amounts make roughly 2 trays of treats (standard oven), which can then be ziplock bagged and frozen (they will keep for a couple of weeks out of the freezer):
500g of your pup’s favourite meat, mince
4 sweet potatoes
200g of flour (this may vary according to the type of flour used)
1 tablespoon of coconut oil (optional)
1/2 tablespoon seaweed meal (optional)
1 clove of garlic, mince
I use a pressure cooker to boil the sweet potatoes (about 14 minutes), if you use a normal pan with boiling water it may take significantly longer (my wild guess is 40 minutes but I never tried): the potatoes are cooked when the peel comes off easily. Once cooked, remove them from the water and let cool.
Once the sweet potatoes are cooled, mix all the ingredients together (time to get the hands dirty!) and work them for a few minutes. If the compost sticks to your hands, add a little bit of flour; if the compost doesn’t stay together, add a little bit of lukewarm water.
Pre-heat the oven at 180 Celsius and lay half the compost on a baking tray covered with a greaseproof sheet; repeat the operation on a second tray using the other half of the compost. Note that the thickness of the compost will dictate its consistency once cooked (thick=chewy, thin=crunchy).
This point is optional: use a pizza cutter to carve a grid on the slabs of compost, making each square the desired size of the final treat. It will make an incision without completely cutting through. This will give the treats a shape of a square puffed in the middle but crunchy on the edges.
Bake each tray individually in the now warm oven for 20-25 minutes (depending on the thickness of the slab). Remove when the slab has a dark golden colour (colour will vary depending on the meat and the flour you used).
The slab will be cool enough to be handled in about 10 minutes: at that point it will easily snap through your fingers along the incision you made before baking. I use these treats as reward during training.
I have noticed that dehydrators have been mentioned too: I bought one on Amazon a couple of weeks ago. It costs less than £50 and it works very well… I only hope that the electricity bill won’t make me regret the purchase!!! :-\
It takes about 6 hours to dry meat.
Thanks for the conversion Meg, I’ve always had electric ovens so it didn’t occur to me to specify the settings for gas ovens
I found seaweed meal on zooplus; it’s basically dried seaweed finely minced. It’s supposed to help with skin and coat problems and I add it mainly because my dog can develop dermatitis quite easily.
Do you think Spirulina would work the same as the seaweed? I have recently been making a some small bite size treats with ground flax seed and goji berries, spirulina and dates to bind. They are mostly for me but the dog has been enjoying a small piece. She loves them but they are very sweet. It would be good to have some other ways to add spirulina.
I use seaweed to add some omega-6 fatty acids to the recipe, so I guess pretty much any edible alga will work the same, including spirulina.
Flax seeds are also a good source of similar fatty acids so they will do great.
I agree on your concerns about dates and the excessive sweetness: human bodies are much better equipped to cope with excessive sugars than dogs, I think I read somewhere that they produce much less insuline than us, but I can’t remember where :-\
One treat I make that I’ve never known any dog to refuse is Sardine and Oat Biscuits. In fact, one Husky at the park who doesn’t like other people very much fell in love with me over these! They are SO easy.
Two tins of sardines in oil.
1 crushed clove or garlic (optional)
60 g Wholemeal flour
300 g Oats.
Empty the two tins of sardines, including the oil, into a bowl. Mash thoroughly with a fork. Add flour, garlic and oats and knead into a dough, adding a little water or oil to bind if needed. Roll out, and cut out biscuits. Cook at 190 celcius for 25-30 mins, until golden brown.
They don’t keep as long as the crispy ones once exposed to the air, but still for a week or two. I bought a small vacuum sealer and pack them into small bags that are easy to carry around and store indefinitely.
