Intro Paragraph:
Relying on commercial foods to care for a dog with allergies can be nearly impossible. First, research has found many commercial foods feature hidden ingredients. Then, due to a lack of regulations, commercial pet foods don’t warn you if they were created in a factory that creates other foods with common allergies, opening up contamination concerns. These are just two of so many reasons why even allergy-based commercial foods can fail to care for our pups.
Thanks to research, we know all the common ingredients that cause food allergies, and #1e Chunky Turkey & White Rice (The Ranchers Dog) eliminates them all. No beef, chicken, fish, egg, legume, potato, corn, or soy. Thanks to the ability to create this meal at home, you control all the ingredients, ensuring there aren’t any hidden allergens in your dog’s meals. So let’s learn how to easily create an allergy-free meal with ChefPaw and all the benefits the ingredients can have for your dog.
Summary Of Benefits
Better Skin & Coat
Itching, swelling, and irritated skin are common symptoms of food allergies, and it’s incredible how fast they destroy a dog’s coat while leaving them susceptible to infected hotspots.
This recipe has several ways it can restore and protect your dog’s skin and coat. From eliminating common allergens to including ingredients that can discourage both allergic reactions and their symptoms while delivering vitamins and minerals that promote healthy skin and coat health.
Supports Digestive Health & Nutrient Absorption
Digestive stress is a common symptom that can greatly hurt your dog’s ability to absorb all the nutrients their food contains. Not only does this result in you throwing your money away, but it can also leave your dog susceptible to more frequent and stronger allergic reactions.
As such, we eliminated ingredients that while often touted for their benefits, can hurt nutrient absorption. This, of course, can create gaps in nutrition. However, this actually allowed us to fill those gaps with ingredients that punch way more above their weight in benefits. Additionally, we included a range of fibrous vegetables that both soothe and support the digestive system.
Discourages Allergic Reactions
Thanks to its novel protein source, i.e., one that isn't common in commercial dog foods and the elimination of all common allergens, #1e is a brilliant diet for avoiding all the food allergens research has found can bother dogs.
Soothes Allergy Symptoms
While eliminating common food allergens is a great way to diagnose food allergies to avoid them from occurring in the future, there is a greater chance your dog’s immune system is naturally more sensitive to allergies in general. This means they are more likely to develop a non-food-based allergy. As such, we included ingredients like apples that are naturally rich in natural antihistamines to reduce allergy symptoms no matter the culprit.
Rich & Diverse
Allergy diets can be a catch-22. Food allergies most often occur due to repeated exposure to undiversified meals. However, a bland and basic diet is crucial to carry out the elimination diet which is used to diagnose the allergen. But the longer that diet goes on, the greater it can trigger an allergy due to overexposure. With the help of your vet, #1e — a more diverse allergy-based meal — can be utilized to help carry out the elimination diet or become the first diet they move to after it’s completed. Its chunky nature creates a more appetizing meal that your dog will be able to enjoy chowing down on for longer, making the recipe a great option for picky eaters.
Cooking Instructions #1:
If you’re curious about how easy it is to cook with ChefPaw, check out the steps below. However, if you don’t want to, then you don’t need to! As the ChefPaw app will direct you in every step of the process.
Step 1: Get Started with the ChefPaw App
Begin by opening the ChefPaw app to choose the recipe you want ChefPaw to prepare for your furry best friend. If you haven’t set up a profile for your dog yet, you’ll want to do that first so ChefPaw can tailor its recipes to your dog’s specific needs.
Step 2: Gather Your Ingredients
The app will guide you on the order you should add the fresh, raw ingredients to the cooking bowl. Make sure to remove the lid first. We suggest using ChefPaw’s built-in scale for accuracy. Simply press the weight button to activate before placing your ingredients into the cooking bowl — it’s that simple!
Step 3: Mix and Cook
Once the ingredients are in, reattach the lid as directed by the app and press just two more buttons to start cooking. After cooking, add any heat-sensitive ingredients as suggested and mix thoroughly by hand. Voila! Let the meal cool before serving or storing.
Cooking Instructions #2:
We love the idea of making our dogs’ food for them at home! And truly believe the savings, potential health benefits, and ease of use to create them with ChefPaw’s help will have the majority of pet parents in the future making their pet’s food right in their kitchen. With that said, when you eliminate ChefPaw from that process, we honestly recommend you stick with commercial foods despite them paling in comparison to ChefPaw’s meals.
ChefPaw eliminates multiple pots and pans, keeping your kitchen tidy. ChefPaw does all the mixing and cooking for you, giving you back your freedom. With ChefPaw, you don’t need a degree in pet nutrition or a lab to carefully formulate the nutrient values of all the meals. Simply put, creating optimal homemade dog food without ChefPaw is a nightmare.
Ingredient Benefits:
- Canned Pumpkin - Packed full of prebiotics and probiotics that support digestive health, pumpkin is the perfect ingredient when we need to eliminate other fibrous vegetables, such as potatoes, that are more prone to causing allergies.
- Carrots - Even allergy-based diets can be diverse. By pairing carrots and pumpkin together, you create a nutrient-rich combination that can help fill nutritional gaps and promote overall well-being.
- Bananas - They're high in potassium, vitamins, biotin, fiber, and copper and low in cholesterol and sodium, making bananas one of our favorite fruits for supporting our dogs’ immune systems and overall health.
- Honey - It’s delicious and theorized that local honey can discourage pollen allergies. This is big because a dog with food allergies is more prone to developing an allergy to a non-food source.
- Apples - We love to place apples in many of our recipes thanks to all their goodies, but we really wanted them here thanks to being a great source of quercetin. Called one of the strongest natural antihistamines, this antioxidant flavonoid is associated with reducing the symptoms of allergies (itching, swelling, runny nose, watery eyes, and so on).
- White Rice - We chose white rice for this recipe vs. brown rice due to white rice being easier to digest, as gastrointestinal issues are common allergy symptoms. Digestive issues can result in poor nutrient absorption, and we wanted to avoid the phytic acid that’s located in the bran of brown rice. Phytic acid can hinder the absorption of essential minerals like calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc.
- Turkey Breast - Novel proteins are key to avoiding food allergies as beef, dairy, chicken, and lamb account for over 70% of dog food allergies. Unfortunately, novel proteins aren’t always affordable or easy to find, but not in Turkey's case. High in protein and low in fat, you can save a lot of money by switching to turkey vs. beef.
- Broccoli Cuts - No recipe is complete without some greens, and broccoli cuts are a great example of all the benefits they can have for dogs. By feeding good gut bacteria, broccoli can help promote a healthy colon, which discourages diseases such as cancer and diabetes.
- Quinoa - Called a superfood for a good reason, quinoa perfectly fills the role of brown rice benefits while staying extremely low in phytic acid, which we wanted to largely eliminate from this recipe.
Supplement Section:
We understand that adding supplements to fresh meals created from whole foods can seem odd. However, every diet, from commercial foods that rely on cooking processes to raw diets that feature limited ingredients, almost always relies on fortifying the meals with several vitamins and minerals.
When you want to give your dog the best diet possible, you just can’t get away from fortifying their food. So, while the following supplements are not essential, we greatly recommend them when you’re looking to create optimal meals that truly support your dog’s health.
ChefPaw Dietary Supplement
Featuring 25 essential vitamins and minerals, the ChefPaw Nutrition Booster Supplement is a great addition to ChefPaw’s recipes. Because we know all-natural is important for many pet parents, we were diligent about only using all-natural ingredients. That’s right, there ISN'T a single synthetic ingredient!
In particular, ChefPaw’s dietary supplement features three types of bioavailable calcium: Calcium Ascorbate, Calcium Chloride, and Calcium Carbonate. It’s nearly impossible to find high-quality meals, whether commercially or created at home, that don’t feature supplemental calcium.
Innovet Wild Alaskan Salmon Oil
While fish is an uncommon allergen, it’s been reported to make up 2% of food allergies. As such, we wanted to avoid including it. However, that means there is a lack of omega-3s to omega-6s, which pretty much always happens when creating meals where the main protein source comes from a land-raised animal. This is why many dog foods, whether commercial or not, feature omega-3 supplementation.
Many experts agree Wild Alaskan Salmon oil is one of the best sources of omega-3s due to their potency in EPA & DHA, affordability, and environmentally friendly nature. While derived from fish, high-quality fish oils like Wild Alaskan are unlikely to trigger a fish allergy, as they are purified to remove impurities, which should eliminate the protein allergen. We do recommend consulting your dog’s vet if you have any concerns.
Optimal Meal Prep with ChefPaw Recipes:
Unlike food sensitivities, food allergies don’t occur overnight. Instead, they happen after repeated exposure to the same limited ingredient day in and day out. This means the sooner you can start diversifying your dog’s meals, the better chance you can prevent them from developing a lifelong allergy. And ChefPaw is perfect for making that a reality.
To diagnose the allergens causing your dog's allergies, they will need to undergo an elimination diet. If no potato allergy is suspected, then #1e recipe can be paired/alternated with recipe #2d Allergy Care With Ground Turkey & Sweet Potato (Gordan’s Grub 2). Sharing many of the same ingredients, your vet may even recommend using recipes #1e and #2d in tandem when carrying out an elimination diet or when coming off of it. Besides the addition of sweet potato, #2d features blueberries instead of bananas. But this slight change is perfect for diversifying your dog’s meals without making big changes that can upset their stomach.
Safe Food Handling Warnings:
With any of ChefPaw’s recipes, we always recommend washing your hands and all fruits and veggies beforehand. However, because this is a recipe designed to avoid allergies, we encourage pet parents to avoid touching the most frequently reported food allergens when preparing their dog’s meals with ChefPaw. You also want to thoroughly clean any surface area that they have come into contact with.
Avoiding the following ingredients is going to be most important when carrying out an elimination diet. In order, from most common to least common reported allergens, that list is beef, dairy products, chicken, wheat, lamb, soy, corn, eggs, pork, and fish and rice.