Does anyone make there own food mix?

[Jill-O]

People here have talked about a recipe for a gel for goldfish food and I'd love to have that one.

As it is now, we recently switched to Ken's Fish Food. Our fish LOVE it and I love what the ingredients say and the HUGE selection of foods.

 

[northwindtucker]

I don't exactly make it but I grow it in my garden and cold frame. My red hooks love the lettuce, spinach and especially the zucchini that I clip on to the side of my tank. I would let them try the fresh snap peas but I never seem to have any left by the time I get to the house.

 

[captmicha]

Ken's Fish Food's have ethoyxquin I think, which isn't a good thing.

 

[dundadundun]

sodium thiosulphate is a dechlorinater only, it breaks the chloramine bond but DOES NOT detoxify the resulting ammonia. NOT the same as Prime. There's a new dry form of Prime called Seachem Safe. I haven't tried it but is supposedly less expensive, easy to store

i would be interested in a chemical analysis of prime and safe. as far as i can find nothing goes into anymore detail than listing sulfide salts as an active ingredient for both bonding to chlorine and the resulting ammo that's released due to the new bond. sodium thiosulfate is a sulfide salt afaik... :hypnotized:

 

[xVitox]

im about to try a new fish food recipe that i have read about
http://www.loaches.com/articles/home-cooking-your-own-frozen-fishfood
I will let everyone know how it goes
I am switching out some ingredients though, adding carrots and tomato juice

 

[fishycat]

Let us know how your adaption works!

I only have a couple handfuls of little fish, so have had to calculate for much smaller batches.

I like using baby food (peas/sweet potatoes/squash) to add vitamins and fiber. I grind thawed deshelled shrimp and mix with the baby food and dump in flake food & freeze-dried bloodworms. I use a chef technique of "blooming" my powdered gelatin in a small amount of cool water for ten minutes. Then I boil veggies in boiling water (collards have high iron - just need to cook longer to soften). I grind up the veggies and add to my shrimp mix. Then I take some of the veggie water and add it to my bloomed gelatin. I microwave this until the mixture is clear. Then I stir this into my shrimp mix.

Portion into sandwich bags 1/4 full. Remove all air and spread mixture into a thin layer. Chill to set, freeze to store. One bag lasts me awhile!

:thm:

 

[xVitox]

Let us know how your adaption works!

I only have a couple handfuls of little fish, so have had to calculate for much smaller batches.

I like using baby food (peas/sweet potatoes/squash) to add vitamins and fiber. I grind thawed deshelled shrimp and mix with the baby food and dump in flake food & freeze-dried bloodworms. I use a chef technique of "blooming" my powdered gelatin in a small amount of cool water for ten minutes. Then I boil veggies in boiling water (collards have high iron - just need to cook longer to soften). I grind up the veggies and add to my shrimp mix. Then I take some of the veggie water and add it to my bloomed gelatin. I microwave this until the mixture is clear. Then I stir this into my shrimp mix.

Portion into sandwich bags 1/4 full. Remove all air and spread mixture into a thin layer. Chill to set, freeze to store. One bag lasts me awhile!
EDIT: Carrots are hard to grind up id suggest using a separate food processor beforehand

:thm:

Mine has worked great, all fish seem to be inhaling it! Def will be a once or twice a week thing

 

[fishycat]

Re: the carrots - are you leaving raw? Definitely would need to be pulverized in a processor separately. Heck, grate 'em first. I'd blanch just to help my smaller fish eat it.

 

[mellowvision]

I usually just measure by eye and color, so I don't have an exact recipe, but I make a few variations on gel food for my bottom feeders and shrimp.

For the most part, I use powdered spirulina, powdered chorella, ground algae wafers and ground ken's veggie sticks... and I also sometimes use liquid marine algae, frozen cyclopseze, baby brine shrimp, and hikari first bites powder. oh and baker's yeast. and of course gelatin.

I don't make it with ALL of the ingredients every time. I mix it up each batch. I make up a liquid but thick, dense bowl of gelatin, and set it aside. Then I grind all my dry ingredients in a mortar and pestle. I take the dry ingredients, any cyclopseze or shrimps, and start to mix it in a bowl, slowly adding gelatin liquid until it's like caramel consistency. I then pour it into silicone ice cube trays, the ones that are long and skinny for water bottles. I let it sit for 1 hour, and then put it into the freezer. 24 hours later, I peel the sticks out of the tray, and keep them in a ziplock freezer bag.

Having it in stick form is great for me, because I can put a tray of small stones in the oven at 200º just to heat them up, and I press the sticks onto the stones, like a wax stamp or craypa. I pretty much paint on the algae, until it gets too sticky to add more. Then back in the oven for 10 minutes, or until the algae is completely crusted over. Bottom feeders and shrimp go nuts over the rocks. A lot of the smaller fish also seem to love the debris that float off the rocks into the water column. It usually takes about 4 hours for a rock to be completely dissolved, but it's usually eaten much faster than that.

So, I pretty much make food every 2 months or so, and bake rocks once a week. If I run out of rocks, I will cut off a 3/4" chunk of the frozen stick, and wedge it into a tiny candle stick holder, which sinks. Sometimes I think this is their favorite way to eat, the gobies pretty much bathe themselves in food when I do this.

 

[chefjamesscott]

I suppliment my useage of ocean nutrition food with market shrimp, I just rip it into pieces and then sqaush it so the fibers of the shrimp sort of seperate and put that in the tank and the fish go to town. I also fine cube wild pacific salmon and drop that in the tank same result the fish go nuts for it. A easy veggie thing to use is nori, the dried seaweed they sell in the grocery store.