Homemade Raw Cat Food Recipe That's Cheaper Than Friskies! S6 E3 Complete Balanced Raw Cat Food

i'm making homemade raw food for the cats that is going to be cheaper than friskies stella splash simba hydrox [Music] the lucky ferals these are the main ingredients that i am using i have ten pounds of fresh chicken thighs this is five pounds and this is five pounds and i paid a dollar twenty nine per pound i also have a package of chicken hearts i paid two dollars and forty nine cents a pound for these chicken hearts we're only going to use some of them and i have a container of chicken livers these were 2.49 cents a pound also and we're only using some of these so the first thing i'm going to do is weigh out the chicken hearts and the chicken livers so i have enough for this recipe anything left over i am going to freeze and i'll use it for the next time that i make homemade raw food for the cats here's my food scale i got this for less than ten dollars at marshalls you could also get them pretty cheap on amazon i'll put a link to food scales in the description below this video and in the comment section so i want to weigh out 14 ounces of the chicken hearts so there's 14 ounces i am going to put these aside and we'll be using this in the recipe this is what's left in the package i am going to put these in a freezer safe container in my freezer this is stella she gets very excited every time i make homemade raw food and she always wants to help me so here she is now we're going to measure out seven ounces of the raw liver so i buy the liver and the hearts at local ethnic markets sometimes it can be very hard to find chicken hearts or chicken livers in a regular supermarket but if you have a local ethnic market like a local asian market a local russian market a local italian market that's where i find these organ meats and if you have a hard time finding them that's where i would suggest looking for them so this is 7.2 ounces the recipe calls for 7 ounces of the chicken livers and 14 ounces of the chicken hearts if you cannot find the chicken hearts you can add extra taurine you could add 4 000 milligrams of extra taurine if you can't find the chicken hearts and you can replace that with 14 ounces of the chicken thigh meat so we're using 14 ounces of chicken hearts and again if you can't find that use 4 000 milligrams of taurine and 14 ounces of the chicken thighs in place of the hearts but if you can find the hearts definitely find the hearts because organ meats such as hearts and liver are full of vitamins minerals and nutrients that are really important for your cat you have to remember when a cat is living in the wild and they're killing their prey if they're killing a bird or a mouse or whatever they're eating they're not just eating the muscle meat they're eating all of the internal organs also because the organs are full of nutrients so that's why we want to make sure we include organ meats in our recipe and if you're looking at ingredients in a can of cat food these should be listed as chicken livers and chicken hearts but sometimes they're referred to as byproducts so these would be chicken by-products because anything that is not muscle meat is a by-product so in many cases when you see the word byproduct on a can of cat food as long as it specifies where the byproducts are from there's nothing bad about that if it says chicken by-products you know it's from a chicken and you know it's something other than the muscle meat and if you think about what a cat eats when it kills a bird it's not just eating the muscle meat it's eating all the byproducts everything including the muscle meat so that's why it's really important to include organ meats when you make homemade food the next thing we want to do is get our chicken ready for the grinder so i have a bowl here i'll be putting the chicken in this bowl and the recipe i'm using says to take the skin off half of the chicken so i'm going to take the skin off this entire package of chicken and if you have cats that are on the chubby side you can take the skin off of all of the chicken you don't want to remove the fat from the chicken because it's important for cats to get a healthy amount of fat in their diet but if you're trying to reduce the weight of your cats you could take the skin off of all of the pieces of chicken or you could take the skin off of like 75 percent of the pieces of chicken and if you're trying to just maintain weight it says just to take the skin off of half of the pieces of chicken so for this recipe we're going to take the skin off of half of the pieces so here's a chicken thigh it's good to wear gloves for this i just really just pull the skin off like that there's still a little bit of fat on it but that's okay and if you want to trim some of the skin that might not pull off you could also do that and if you have a use for this chicken skin then obviously put it to good use but we're not going to be using it in this recipe this recipe says to remove 25 of the bone from these chicken thighs so each 5 pound pack has 8 pieces of chicken i just took the skin off of eight pieces of chicken and so we're going to remove the bones from four of those pieces and that will be from 25 because i have a total of 16 pieces and 25 of 16 is four so here's my chicken thigh and this is the way that i take the bone out i am not a chef this is probably not the professional way to do it this is just the way that i do it so i i put the chicken thigh on this board so that i can see the bone it's like bone side up and then i just try to cut along the bone on one side and then i turn it around and i try to cut along the bone on the other side i mean our goal is just to get the bone out it doesn't have to be pretty and then what i'll do is i'll take my knife and just being very careful i'll put it underneath the bone and work my way up to the top and just kind of cut it free the best that i can and this is not like a cooking show you see on tv nothing has to look pretty it's all going to be thrown in a grinder for cats so i just take my knife and kind of work it down the bone to free up as much meat as i can and then now that we're on the bottom i just try to cut cut the rest of the bone free so there's the bone that's not too bad and then i think there's a little bit more here maybe it's just some tough cartilage and you can use any knife that you're comfortable using you can use a large chef's knife if you're comfortable with that i like to use a utility knife so i need to do this for three more of these thighs i just opened the second package of chicken thighs and i'm going to show you how i'm going to cut these into smaller pieces to fit the grinder better so here's my chicken thigh again it's bone side up and i'm just going to cut one third of it off of the right and this still has the skin on it and then i'm just gonna cut off another chunk on this side again it is more helpful if you have a sharp knife so these pieces will easily fit into the grinder [Music] so here's all the chicken it is ready for the grinder this is the grinder that i will be using today it is a stand mixer attachment and i got this at bed bath and beyond almost a year ago they were selling it for 99.99 i believe that was the price and then i had a 20 off coupon so i got it for around 80 and at the time i wanted to make small batches of homemade raw food for ditto and i could not grind up any bones because he had a very large wound in his mouth so everything that i fed him had to be really soft and then eventually totally pureed so that's why i bought this just so i could do small batches for him i do have a larger professional butcher series grinder that i normally use when i make homemade raw food for the cats that grinder costs around 500. and this grinder is much cheaper and it is more accessible for more people so that's why today i am using this one and i'll put a link in the description and in the comment section below this video to where you can also purchase this food grinder so i still keep it in the box i use it then i clean it and i put it right back in the box so this is the grinder attachment and the last time i used it i used a really fine grind on it but we don't want to do that when we're grinding up bones we want to use a much coarser grind so this comes with three grinding blades here we have a fine a medium and a coarse blade normally what i'll do is i'll use the coarse blade first and i'll use the pieces of chicken that don't have bones like you know how we took bones out of one fourth of the chicken so we took bones out of four of the chicken thighs normally i would grind those coarsely and then i would change out the blade to like the medium blade and then grind up the pieces with the bones but today i'm not going to do that we're just going to use the medium blade for everything this meat grinder is basically a mini version of the larger meat grinder that i use when i'm making larger portions of cat food so here's my stand mixer and this is where the grinding attachment goes so i'm gonna take this piece off and i'm just gonna put in the grinding attachment make sure the side is loose enough that it fits right in and then we're going to tighten it up and that was easy i normally use a large aluminum pan to catch the ground meat so the ground meat will come out here and it will fall into the pan and then it makes it really easy to mix everything together in a large pan the first thing that i usually start with are the organ meats because they are the softest they are the easiest to go through the grinder and then i follow them up with the firmer pieces of chicken so i'm going to start with the chicken livers also you want to make sure that you put your hand here in front of where the meat comes out in case anything splatters that can happen when you first start grinding especially with organ meats so you want to use speed number four so that's what it looks like we have the liver on the bottom it's really liquidy and then these are what the hearts look like and you definitely want to use the food pusher to help push the meat through the grinder now we're going to work on the rest of the thigh meat here's a piece with the bone [Music] here's all the meat that just went through the grinder i am going to unplug the mixer and take the grinding attachment off and then we're going to add some more ingredients to this ground meat i am now adding four raw egg yolks you don't want to add the egg whites because raw egg whites can block the absorption of some b vitamins in cats but the yolks are fine they're very high in nutrients i'm adding two capsules of taurine these are 1 000 milligrams of taurine so i'm adding 2 000 milligrams so raw meat has a lot of taurine in it specifically the chicken hearts we put in here and the dark meat of the chicken thighs those all have taurine in them and i've spoken to my vet about this about do you need to add additional taurine when you're making homemade food with raw meat he feels that you don't need to add the extra taurine because there is the naturally occurring taurine in the meat he also acknowledges that there are other vets that definitely think you do need to add the extra taurine and the recipe i'm using says to add extra taurine some people feel that it's not harmful to the cats other people feel that nobody really knows if it will be harmful in the long run since it is an additional supplement and it's not the naturally occurring taurine so sometimes it's better to err on the side of caution this recipe includes it so i am going to include it also what i normally do is i just break open a taurean capsule and i sprinkle it on and i'll do it with the other one also and this is all gonna get mixed together adding additional taurine is just basically like having an insurance policy just to make sure that there's enough in the meat for the cats there normally should be but some people just like that extra boost this recipe also calls for 4 000 milligrams of fish oil i've used several different fish oil supplements the one i'm currently using is this grizzly salmon plus omega 360 food supplement for dogs and cats one pump has a thousand milligrams so i'm adding four pumps i actually added five because some of those were not full pumps i also make sure that my cats eat fish-based food one day a week to make sure that they're getting a good amount of omega-3s in their diet that way so i'll feed them some canned sardines some canned salmon that kind of food now we want 200 milligrams of vitamin b complex so these are each 100 milligram capsules and i'm going to open these up and sprinkle these in also the recipe calls for one and a half teaspoons of light salt for the iodine content but i use kelp instead and i'm gonna add two teaspoons of kelp this is what it looks like it's like a green powder this is a half teaspoon so i'm going to add four of these so kelp contains iodine it also contains some calcium phosphorus salt and potassium the recipe also calls for 200 iu of vitamin e and it says to use a powdered form of vitamin e i have not found a powdered form around here i know you could buy it online i haven't done that yet other people use this liquid vitamin e and this is what i've been using a quarter teaspoon of this is about 400 iu so i'm probably gonna put in about an eighth of a teaspoon the next thing i need to do is put my gloves on and get my hands dirty mixing this all up you obviously can use a spoon or whatever you would like to use to mix it i just find it's the most efficient to use my hands so this is the basic homemade cat food let's talk about how much this cost to make so i got 10 pounds of chicken thighs for a dollar 29 a pound that was 12.90 i got the liver and hearts for 2.49 a pound we only used 22 ounces so we ended up using 3.49 worth of the organ meats for the eggs i got my eggs for about 2.99 a dozen we used four egg yolks so that would have been about 75 cents i used 26 cents worth of taurine 50 cents worth of fish oil 48 cents worth of vitamin b capsules 15 cents worth of vitamin e liquid and 20 cents worth of kelp so i used a total of two dollars and 34 cents worth of supplements when we add together the cost of the chicken the organ meats and the supplements the total is 18 and 73 cents so if we divide that by 10 because we made approximately 10 pounds of food that means it cost us 1.87 a pound and friskies is currently selling for two dollars and 33 cents a pound so we've just saved 46 cents a pound and that's four dollars and sixty cents for 10 pounds of food and we know exactly what's in the food and all of the ingredients are much higher quality than what's in a can of typical supermarket brand canned cat food so although this is the recipe for basic homemade raw cat food when i make it for my cats i do like to add some extra ingredients to boost the nutrition and to provide a little bit of extra fiber for their digestion this is a product that i like to add it's called amazing grass amazing trio this is barley grass wheatgrass and alfalfa the reason why i like to use this is because the cats love eating cat grass and when they were living outside they loved eating grass outside if you observe feral cats living in nature they love to eat grass especially if they're not feeling well and this is a powdered grass supplement it also has good nutrients for them it has some vitamin a some vitamin c vitamin k calcium iron sodium and potassium so wild cats are obligate carnivores and they do require animal protein as the main part of their diet when living in nature they do get five percent maybe even 10 percent of their diet from plant matter when they eat their prey they eat the entire contents of the digestive tract which often contains pre-digested or semi-digested plant material and they also do chew on plants that's why a lot of inside cats love to chew on house plants because they have an innate desire to eat greens it's really important to provide your cat with fresh cat grass keeps them away from your house plants for example when i was growing up we had a cat that loved eating lettuce so this is why i really like to supplement the food that i make with powdered grass so in this case i'm going to be using one scoop and the cost of this scoop would be 90 cents obviously if you can get the supplements on sale or cheaper if you have a coupon then it brings the cost even lower so by adding the greens it brings the total up to 19.63 which is a dollar ninety six a pound that's still cheaper than friskies being sold at two dollars and 33 cents a pound i also like to add one or two cups of some kind of vegetables sometimes i'll use some canned pureed pumpkin other times i'll steam some vegetables and puree them myself sometimes i'll very very finely grind some vegetables i've done that with zucchini in the past the cats like that i've done it with butternut squash the cats like that today i have some carrots and i also have some zucchini and i've steamed these so what i'm going to do is i'm going to puree these in a little food processor and then i'm going to put the pureed vegetables into the cat food some people will tell you that you don't need to add any vegetable matter to your cat food because cats are obligate carnivores other people say it is good for them because it is good for them to get the additional fiber in their digestive tract any kind of phytonutrients that might be in the vegetable matter basically opinions are very mixed almost everyone you talk to gives you a different opinion if you read books about homemade cat food that were published through the years basically the recipes are always changing because every year we're learning new and more things about cats their bodies and how they work so for me i choose to add these extras by all means they are not part of the basic recipe you don't have to add them here are the pureed veggies and i'll be adding these also notice how the amount of vegetables i'm using is a very small percentage compared to the amount of meat that is being used cats are obligate carnivores and they should be on a meat based diet here's all the food with everything mixed in so adding the extra vegetables cost me another 78 cents so it brings my grand total to twenty dollars and forty one cents that is two dollars and four cents a pound still cheaper than two dollars and thirty three cents a pound so if i wanted to continue adding extra supplements which i sometimes do i still have room in that budget for it to be cheaper than friskies or any of the supermarket brand canned cat foods so all of this food now has to be frozen there are several ways you can freeze it some people like to freeze this in ice cube trays and then just take out the frozen cubes as needed i used to take a cookie sheet and put parchment paper on it and then use a cookie scoop to scoop this out into about one ounce scoops then i would freeze the scoops on the cookie sheets once they were frozen i would then take them and put them in a ziploc bag and keep them in my freezer so i would then portion out about one scoop per cat sometimes one and a half scoops per cap i should also mention i did not mix any water into this food but i do mix water into this food when i serve it to the cats and if you look at any canned cat food that is being sold you will always see water as one of the first ingredients it's usually like the second ingredient sometimes it's the first ingredient sometimes it's the third ingredient it's usually up there near the top of the ingredients and the reason why is because they need water for processing or they just need water in the food in general i did not add any water to this but i do add water to it before i serve it it's just much easier to freeze without the water and it's more condensed right now so that makes it easier to freeze also my newest method for freezing homemade raw cat food is by using these paper ice cream containers this is basically a one pint ice cream container i purchased a case of these online i think it was like fifty dollars for a case of i don't know if it was like a hundred or two hundred but i have a lot of them and what i'll do is i'll just scoop out the homemade food and i'll fill this up and then i'll label it with the date that it was made and then it will go into my freezer and it has been the best method so far because it's really easy just to fill this up and i could fit a lot more in my freezers because i'm not freezing them on trays for example and then all i have to do is defrost this and it will stay good in my refrigerator for up to 48 hours so that's no problem when i'm feeding for inside cats we go through about eight ounces a day so this lasts up to two days and that has been how i've been freezing this but again you can freeze this any way that works for you so here are all the containers i just filled um nine of them are completely full and then this last one has 5.7 ounces in it and as you can see each one has a little bit more than a pound so this is like one pound point seven ounces one pound 1.6 ounces one pound 1.4 ounces and when i add everything together it comes out to 10 pounds 1.6 ounces so it's almost exactly 10 pounds of food which means all of our calculations are correct with regards to dividing the total by 10 to come out to the cost per pound so i have 10 pounds of homemade raw cat food and it cost me 20 dollars and 41 cents and that's with adding extras to it so it is definitely cheaper to make homemade raw cat food the only thing that it takes more of is time you definitely need at least an hour maybe even two hours of time to make a big batch of food like this but because you control all of the ingredients and you know what's in the food and exactly what you're feeding the cat that can definitely be worth it in the long run also of course this recipe can also be modified you don't always have to use chicken sometimes i'll use turkey sometimes i'll use like cornish game hens there's some stores around here that sell quail sometimes i'll use quail i've used rabbit before you can use any kind of meat that is suitable for a cat to eat you just have to make some adjustments to the recipe based on the quantity of bone in the foods that you're using but if you do a search on the internet you can usually find some information about that as to what those percentages are and another thing that i like to do for my cats is to give them a little bit more variety than just eating this homemade raw food all the time sometimes i will buy them some commercial raw food for snacks they get some dry food and some canned food so i do like to give them a bit of a variety to make sure that they're getting all of the vitamins and the minerals that they need i just wanted to share this recipe with you because with the rising costs of cat food it is just really crazy and i'm looking at these prices and i'm thinking it's not worth it when i can make my own and we're basing this comparison on some of the cheapest cat food on the market if we base this comparison on some of the more expensive cat food on the market you can definitely see where there is a much greater savings with these prices it's a really good time for more people to start learning how to make their own homemade cat food this is my cat food freezer you can see how these containers fit perfectly the ones on the top are the ones we just made and then i also have eight ounce containers and those i've been using also thank you for watching this lucky girls video if you enjoyed it please give it a thumbs up please subscribe if you'd like me to post more videos and please make sure to check out these other videos that were selected especially for you [Music]

Channel: Lucky Ferals

Views: 841,633

Keywords: cat, cats, cat vlog, cat vlogger, cat video, homemade, cat food, food, raw cat food, homemade raw cat food, raw cat food recipe, recipe, raw cat food diet, diet, raw cat food prep, raw cat food reviews, raw cat food meal prep, raw cat food supplements, supplements, raw cat food diy, cheap raw cat food, affordable raw cat food, cheap, affordable, cheap raw diet for cats, homemade cat food, homemade cat food recipes, homemade cat food chicken, DIY, friskies

Id: 6U8L4ncTv08

Length: 31min 17sec (1877 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022