Creating a kibble

[whybiesmommy]

Hey all! I a hybrid feeder. Kibble to munch on and hydratedFDR at night. I have been bopping around the idea of making my own kibble. I have researched, contacted professionals , minimized ingredients and removed grains ,plant and vegetable . My issue is the degrading of nutrients and vitamins. I’m thinking low and slow . Adding in taurine, tiny amount of chicory root powder not syrup, basically dumping a supplement as a binder and mashing meat and muscle and organs and baking. Of course I’ll add egg yolk. What are your thoughts onlosing vitamins or will that not matter due to meat feeding once a day.

[Corvidophile]

My opinion? Too much work for a worse product in the end for only a small amount of convenience feeding. You’re right, you will lose vitamins when you cook it, and you’ll have to add them back in in the form of supplements. If you already know how to formulate your own dry food from scratch, then you already know how to feed fresh meat, right? Then they get the added moisture- fantastic for all manner of health, as ferrets are bad at drinking- and the variety of eating different tasting and feeling things at different times. Or if your problem is that your ferret is avoiding a certain necessary ingredient, like they won’t eat liver by itself without turning their nose up, as an example, grind everything up and feed the diet as minced. Put a batch in silicone ice cube trays, freeze overnight, pop them out, store in a bag in the freezer, defrosts at room temp in an hour or in the fridge in half a day. If you really want, you can take that same minced meat mixture you made, buy a freeze drying machine, and make your own FDR at a fraction of the price as store bought stuff.

I can’t come up with a good reason to cook it. I really can’t. The storage life won’t be much longer without heavy preservative use and storing it, yes even dry food, in the freezer. It’ll still be colonized by bacteria sitting out in the open all day in the ferret’s food bowl. Kibble is still teeming with bacteria, just different bacteria than raw food. Can still get food poisoning from it. Even the heavily preserved commercial kibbles are frequently found to be covered in salmonella and E. coli.

Cooked meat, unless freeze dried first, turns into a rock. Very hard to eat. It’s the carbs in kibble that keep it soft and palatable. When you remove them, you’re left with, essentially, beef jerky to the extreme.