Wildly balanced recipe for cats
Got a fancy pants kitteh, and access to a wide range of delectable ingredients? This is the balanced recipe for you!
That said, if you can't find or afford some of the animal ingredients, it's fine to swap for similar alternatives (I just can't guarantee it will remain "balanced", but it shouldn't be far off).
This recipe contains heart meat and mussels for taurine, egg for vitamin D3, hempseeds for vitamin E, nutritional (inactive) yeast for vitamin B1 and fur for digestive health - amongst other things.
INGREDIENTS
300g whole quail with bones
300g chicken gizzards (sometimes labelled giblets)
150g emu heart
92g mussels
60g lamb liver
70g egg
12g hempseeds
8g hempseed oil
5g turmeric
1g black pepper
1g nutritional yeast
1g kelp powder
Fur (or cut up furry treats, like kangaroo ears)
METHOD
The idea behind the turmeric, hempseed oil and black pepper is that you can make a golden paste to maximise their benefits, however, they're actually added functionally to provide manganese and vitamin E, so you don't have to do this if you don't want to.
Other than that, as with all my recipes, there's no strict method and you can prepare this however it best suits you.
I typically combine all of the oils, seeds and powders in a bowl to help with palatability.
Then cut any pieces of meat and meaty bone to size and distribute them fairly evenly between daily serves, and freeze.
You can also just chuck everything in a Tupperware and portion based on vibes, which is closer to what I do.
If you can't be eff'ed with the fiddly bits, you can replace the bottom 10 ingredients with our Wild Blend for dogs and cats (this works well if you also have dogs to feed!). Similarly, if your cat doesn't do bones, replace the bone-in meat with boneless and use a calcium supplement or our Wild Blend.
This recipe makes approximately 1kg of raw food, and you can simply multiply it out for bulk prep if you want to make a larger batch.
This recipe is written in accordance with the AAFCO standards for adult cats, making it a "complete and balanced" recipe. As formulated, the key nutritional values are 1384 k/cals per kilogram, of which 17.4% is protein, 7.43% is fat, 1% is fibre, and 0.5% is carbs (plus 71.6% water and 2% ash). The calcium to phosphorus ratio is approximately 0.93:1
This is a fairly average calorie recipe, ideal for cats that are a healthy weight and are open to trying new things. We suggest feeding round 2-4% of your cat's ideal weight, so a 5kg cat would eat 100-200g of food per day. I find cat portions vary WILDLY, so take that with a grain of salt. Always monitor your cat when they eat bones.
This recipe has been memorialised in film as a bulk meal prep by the lovely Shannon, for her house tigers, for whom I wrote it. Check it out at @echo.and.iynx on Insta or @echo.smithfieldx on TikTok.
