Carmelo Fruciano
Over the years I have frequently changed the way I prepare my home-made fish food and now I think I found the best way. If I compare this one with the previous, I find it doesn't pollute the water as much and is quicker to use.
I've used this recipe for a few years now and I think it's now time to tell you about it.
In this article you'll find an example of the ingredients (and their ratios) but every time I prepare my fish food I change them. This way I'm sure to constantly offer a variety in the diet of my fish, thus preventing nutritional troubles.
There are a lot of recipes out there but what I don't see often is using gelatine to bond pieces of food together. I always use animal gelatine and I'm really happy with it.
First of all, you have to cook the vegetables.
Usually, I steam the vegetables (till they're soft) but sometimes I boil them for about ten minutes. You can choose one way or the other. After that you have to strain off the water from the vegetables and let them cool down (but keep the water where you cooked them so you can use it later).
While the vegetables are coolin' down, you have to prepare the animal ingredients: shell the shrimps and chop the chicken breast and the beef to small pieces.
Now it is time to reduce all the ingredients to pieces so small that they can be easily eaten by any fish...in order to achieve this, put both the vegetables and the animal ingredients (beef, chicken breast, shrimps and egg-yolk) into a food processor (one of those that can give you fine pieces of meat, 1 millimiter or so). Using a food processor you'll obtain a fine paste.
Other people uses a normal blender but I prefer a food processor because a blender reduces the ingredients to too thin pieces and to a liquid suspension. Besides that, a blender can burn out if you put inside it materials that are too hard.
Once your mixture has become paste (if you used a food processor it should be very dense, absolutely not liquid), you have to put it in a blender. Also add the flake food and the garlic chopped to fine pieces.
At this point, keep everything into the blender but don't use it, it's time to prepare the gelatine.
This is, in my opinion, the most important step of the entire process: if you do something wrong (sometimes it also happens to me) you can throw all into the garbage!
The animal gelatine, as you may know, has to be melted with hot water.
What is really important is that you need more gelatine than the manufacturer suggests you need. For example, if you have 300 grams of ingredients, you have to use the amount of gelatine suggested for 500 grams. The next important thing is that the quantity of water used to melt the gelatine has to be really small.
Usually I melt the gelatine in a small pot with a diameter of about 8 cm (about 3.15 inches) filled with just 1 cm (about 0.40 inches) of water. It's a really small volume of water (80 milliliters circa).
The quantity of water you use has to be small 'cause if we use too much water we'll obtain a liquid with lumps in it while we want a "pudding-like" paste.
I usually melt the gelatine in part of the water I used to cook the vegetables: this is the reason why I told you to keep the water!
You have to melt the gelatine on a low heat and mixing it all the time until it is totally melted (sometimes you can't melt all the gelatine because you have too little water, but that's not a problem).
When the gelatine is totally melted, you have to wait for it to cool down till it's just tepid. You have to let it cool down because if you use boiling gelatine it will scorch the meat.
When the liquid gelatine is tepid, put it in the blender with the other ingredients and use the blender for a very short time so mixing the gelatine with the rest of the ingredients. We don't use the blender to chop nor to mix the other ingredients, we only use it to add the gelatine to our paste (not just a thin layer over it): this way our paste will be more solid.
Now you have to remove all the dense paste you obtained and put it in plastic bags in a thin layer so you can easily cut the food when it's time to feed your fishes. Leave the bags alone for some hour so all the paste can harden.
Finally, put the bags in your freezer.
It's really simple to feed your fishes with this food.
You just have to cut a piece of it and put it to defrost in a glass (put the rest of the food back in the freezer as soon as you can). Every now and then check the food in the glass with a fingertip. When the food isn't cold anymore, you can give it to your fishes!
You cannot use ingredients that have previously been deep-frozen.
It doesn't matter if the ingredients are not perfectly mixed: what is important is they are chopped in thin pieces. For example, if you have a part of food with more chicken-breast pieces and another part with less...no problem: it's just another way to change your fishes' diet on a daily basis!
The most common error you can do preparing this food (as I said before, sometimes I happen to make it, too) it's to use too much water to melt the gelatine. If you use too much water you'll end up with a liquid food that will pollute your aquarium.
On the other side, if you use too much gelatine and too little water, you'll end up with a too solid food, but this isn't a big problem because usually the fishes can still eat small pieces of food (but with more effort than usual).
The ideal consistence is the same as the one you can find in a pudding (or a bit harder), so the fishes can easily eat small pieces of food but they don't cloud the water doing this.
After reading all this article maybe you're feeling like this way of preparing frozen fish food is really long: I assure it isn't true, we just went into preparation details and it seems longer than it really is! Usually it takes about half an hour to prepare this food.
It's better to rely on this food just as an integration to your normal flake food (or similar) because, while this food is really rich, it's still difficult to say if it's balanced! Personally, I use this homemade food for all my fishes but not with the same frequency. I feed it to my discus fish everyday (because one of them doesn't eat dried foods). I feed it to my Neolamprologus just a couple of times a week because they have really different nutritional needs from discus fishes. The same things apply to every tank I care...sometimes also the Dascyllus on my nanoreef is fortunate enough to receive a little piece of this frozen food!
Don't prepare too much food once, prepare a quantity you can finish in about a month (but don't overfeed!) so it won't go bad. When you finish the food prepare it again with other ingredients, so you don't rely on the same monotonous diet.
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