Batch cooking
Week 3
We're going to need a bigger pan - it's batch cooking week!
After introducing your dog to their first home-cooked recipes, and looking at how to balance your dog's nutrition, it’s time to start looking at the practicalities of switching more of their meals away from processed to home-cooked with batch cooking.
Learn how batch cooking can help you increase the amount of home-cooked food in your dog’s diet
Use My VetChef to manage batch cooking and food storage
Cook up a batch of your dog’s favourite VetChef recipe, and weight out and store your dog’s food
So, sit back, watch this short video, and get cooking :)
Big is best
Cooking up a batch of 4, 6 or even 10 meals for your dog in one go is not much more time-consuming than preparing a single meal. So, choose a recipe your dog enjoys - or try this delicious pork and sweet potato recipe - and get batch cooking.
Pork with sweet potato and spinach
This is easy dish, and it’s ideal for dogs who need to avoid rice in their diet. It combines tender protein from pork, with energy from sweet potato, vitamins and minerals from spinach, and a healthy boost of flavour from sage.
For this dish, you’ll need to chop up the sweet potato into small chunks – wash them first but there‘s no need to peel them. Then add all the ingredients together in a pan with the water and bring to the boil. Simmer gently for around 25-30 minutes, stirring regularly, until the sweet potato is soft.
Dinner time
Once you’re happy with cooking up batches of food for your dog, cook up batches of a few different recipes and start to stock up your fridge and freezer. Using My VetChef to manage your stored meals, you can now start to feed more fresh meals to your dog, rotating between different recipes to ensure they get all the benefits of a healthy varied diet. .
Dr Joe's top tips
Use the app
On the recipe page of My VetChef, you can change the number of meals in the batch, and the ingredient quantities will be scaled up accordingly. The fridge & freezer functions also help manage your stored food.
Phone home
Using your phone calculator makes dividing up a batch of food into meals super-easy - just divide the total weight of the cooked food up into the number of meals, and subtract that amount one at a time.
Reuse and recyle
.Recycled takeaway containers and freezer bags are ideal for small to medium dogs, and larger plastic boxes such as old ice-cream tubs work well for larger dogs. Make sure you write the recipe on the lid so you know what’s in each container.
How did it go?
With a few batches of freshly cooked food in the fridge and freezer, you’re now well on the way to transitioning your dog away from processed food to a diet rich in healthier freshly cooked meals. By now you may well have noticed some positive changes in your dog’s physical and mental condition – more energy, glossier coat, better behaviour – and maybe also in your relationship with your dog. Taking the time to prepare fresh meals is a wonderful way of giving something back to your dog and repaying some of that unconditional love they show you every day.
Next week is Snacks & Treats weeks - and if you can't wait for the email to come through, click here to skip forwards to week 4.