Making your own fish food can be fun — if you like to make a mess in the kitchen. Homemade fish food can also be a less expensive alternative to flake foods.
There are lots of recipes out there for homemade fish foods; most of them have similar ingredients in different proportions. Expect to mix up whole fish, vegetable matter, beef heart, and unflavored gelatin. This is an adaptation of a recipe I found at FishLore.
Ingredients:
- Multivitamins (non coated) with vitamin C
- Unflavored gelatin
- Beef heart
- Spinach leaves without stems
- One small zucchini
- Several carrots
- Bait minnows or other small fish
- Shrimp
- Mosquito larvae or other larvae (which you can collect yourself or buy from a pet store)
Sounds delicious, doesn’t it? It does if you’re a fish!
First crush two or three of the vitamins into powder. Next, you’ll need a food processor. Process about a pound of beef heart after you cut away the fat. Add a handful of spinach leaves, the zucchini, and three medium sized carrots. Process again. Next add two pounds of bait minnows, a pound of shrimp, and a pound of larvae. Process again until you have a nice thick paste.
You might want to have the windows open and a fan running while you’re doing all this. I can’t imagine you want your house to smell like homemade fish food! It isn’t a bad idea to make up a six month supply every time you make fish food, so you don’t have to suffer through the process too often.
Once you’ve got the processed paste, add a liter of water and bring the mixture to a low boil. This helps the blood congeal. While the mixture is boiling, dissolve three boxes of unflavored gelatin in a liter of cool water. After the processed paste and water have cooled a bit, mix in the gelatin and cool water. Let the mixture set overnight in the fridge.
After 24 hours, you can separate the mixture into portions that will feed your tank for two or three days. Freeze the portions in individual sandwich bags. Keep one bag thawed in the fridge at all times so you’re ready to feed your fish!