Today's tip - make your own dried meat treats

Before refrigeration technology, before chemicals and before other food preserving techniques our forefathers were still preserving meat. After all you can't eat a buffalo in one day, not even a sheep so they had to invent a way to store that meat. Now we don't need it anymore since we have all we need but our furry friends will always appreciate meat over biscuits.

Photo by 9mm

In all pet shops you can buy whatever you want, quality or quantity, natural or not. Now as a dog owner you will tend to act very strange. At one level you spoil your dog with clothes, plush toys and other useless stuff considering your dog as a family member or kid; at the other level you realize that your dog is not your kid so you don't want to cook for it so you feed junk food, that kind of food you will not serve to your enemy ... yet you still serve your beloved dog. I will discuss foods on other post, today is just a tip for home made treats.

Usually dog treats are strange biscuits with a funky smell from whatever producer that assures us that is a premium food, still when you look on the label at contents you can find some ash there and other things that make that food more or less artificial. Even the spongy look can make you wonder how natural it is but still you buy it.

If you have money and don't want to feed your dog with biscuits then you have the option to buy some really overpriced junk meat. At least is meat but if you think that you pay a lot of money on pig ears or pig stomach stripes ... if you want some lamb or beef you need to dig deeper in the pockets for a small bag of treats, few hundred grams.

I was talking in the beginning about our ancestors and their way to keep the meat for longer time. You don'y need it anymore but you can use it for your dog. How they were doing it? They were drying the meat in the sun. Now, maybe you don't want to look like a caveman hanging meat stripes on your porch or on your balcony but you have the technology in your house.

How to do it: 

1. buy some beef meat that you find at sales, cut the meat in stripes, not too thin, not too big; you can make it also as small cubes but takes too much time; 
2. cleaning the fat is not so important like it is when you prepare it for yourself, since the dogs don't mind if the fat gets a bit rancid
3. put the stripes in an oven heated at maximum 90 degrees Celsius and let them for about 2-3 hours
4. check after 90 minutes and then at a 30 minutes interval, until they are dried
5. put them in a closed jar and keep them out of moisture, or in the fridge if you want.

Of course you can try also with lamb, chicken or turkey.

Why 90 degrees and not more? You don't want to cook it to destroy all vitamins, you could easily make use a lower temperature. 90 is just for speed and convenience because you want to achieve in few hours what is achieved in nature in few days and you don't want to look like neighborhood's Flintstones family.

Why do it? Because you know what meat was used, you are sure is better than a biscuit or whatever dried meat rest you buy from pet shop, and can be cheaper.