How to Make Healthy Raw Dog Treats at Home

I love making food for my dogs.

It’s a labor of love, and an investment in my animals that I care about very deeply. It helps them perform better in their respective sports, it alleviates issues with their skin and coats, keeps them feeling healthy, and I know exactly what goes into each batch.

It’s icing on the cake, so to speak, that my dogs all adore eating their homemade dog food.

The whole thing, while it does require me to stay on top of making the batches themselves, is really rather easy and hands-off in terms of cooking. I section and grind up some chickens in the Weston 22 meat grinder I got last year specifically for this purpose, slightly pre-cook some rice, and the rest is just dumping the rest of the ingredients into the crock pot (or, after starting to make food for 80-lb Milo, the giant turkey roaster).

After that, I portion it out and I am done until they start running low. Easy-peasy.

But something I had put off for some time after starting my routine of making my dogs’ food from scratch was making my own training treats. There is something so convenient about commercial dog treats, and there are plenty of really awesome and healthy commercial dog treats, like the freeze-dried options at Raw Paws Pet Food (which I talk about in my article, A Review of Raw Paws Pet Food).

As a dog trainer and a homemade dog food enthusiast, you’d think I’d be making my own dog treats, right? After all, while commercial treats are awesome and convenient, they do come with an often hefty price tag.

And when you’re training several dogs for a living, dog treats seem to just burn right through your pockets. I buy a bag of awesome tripe treats, and they’re gone in a week or so.

I definitely want to keep buying commercial treats for their convenience and easy storage in my bait pouch, but I kept thinking to myself how nice it would be to be able to just have something high-value that I can make from home when I am just working on things in my own environment.

The last straw was recently, when I was in a big box pet store. I walked my training dog through the aisles and noticed a bag of sweet potato treats. The bag of treats was made of maybe half of one medium sweet potato, cut into strips and dried. This half of a sweet potato had a price tag of nearly eight dollars.

I was disgusted! Were people really paying almost eight dollars for a dehydrated half of a sweet potato? I went home still unable to believe how truly gross the pet industry can be.

Well, the final straw dropped and I finally decided to have a go at making dog treats from home. I got myself a starter dehydrator to try out the process. I ended up purchasing this exact one, which is also available on amazon for about $45 (or less than 6 bags of sweet potato treats, ugh).

It’s the Elite Gourmet Food Dehydrator, which is an awesome starter dehydrator and looked to be perfect for my needs: occasional use to make batches of dog treats from different meats and vegetables.

This really isn’t a product review for the Elite Gourmet dehydrator, but to briefly touch on the dehydrator itself: I’m happy with it for my purposes. It works well to dehydrate meats and various fruits and vegetables to make jerky and treats for dogs, is just the right size for easy storage, has several settings in case I’d like to use it for other things, and the inserts are very easy to clean.

This dehydrator works by circulating warm air through the different trays stacked on top of it, so all of the layers get dried out mostly at the same rate. I did have to switch a few trays around to more evenly distribute the process, but it was hardly a difficult process to do so.

I’m not sure if it’s recommended to do so, but I’ve even put the inserts in the dishwasher with no issues so far.

I did consider investing in a more heavy-duty dehydrator in the future, but so far this one is serving my purposes so well that upgrading doesn’t seem necessary.

How to Make Dehydrator Dog Treats

I started off the process with two different types of dog treats, just based on some things I had in my dog food freezer already. That was some boneless skinless chicken breast, and some sliced beef liver.

The whole process was actually very straightforward. I diced up the meat into pieces that were reasonably-sized for my dogs, placed them in the trays of the dehydrator, and set the dehydrator to the highest setting.

I put my dog treats in the dehydrator raw, which worked fine, but in future batches for safety I would pre-cook my treats a little bit prior to dehydrating them, since they’re meant to be out for a chunk of time for training.

For both the chicken and the liver treats, the bulk of the visible dehydrating happened in the first couple of hours. After that, it was mostly waiting for them to dry all the way through, which happened over the next few hours.

There’s no shaking it, this is a long process. However, a lot like I talk about when discussing my homemade dog foods, it is kind of a matter of “set it and forget it.” You prep the food to go into the dehydrator, turn it on, and leave it running.

I can’t speak for every dehydrator brand or model, but the one that I purchased was really quiet. It was kind of a soft hum in the background that was really easy to forget while going about my day.

I came back to the dehydrator to check every couple hours, and removed any trays with treats that were finished. I was even able to set the dehydrator to go overnight and woke up to pretty respectable quantities of single-ingredient dog treats!

And yes, since then I’ve been able to recreate those sweet potato dog chews/treats from home at a fraction of the price of those commercial ones.

How to Store Homemade Dog Treats

When they first came out of the dehydrator, I put my first round of homemade dog training treats in plastic baggies.

However, I pretty quickly switched to mason jars to help keep them well-preserved over longer periods of time.

Homemade treats should always be stored in the refrigerator between uses, and in the freezer if you are not going to use them up in about a week. Because these are fresh foods (and in this batch, raw foods) they need to be used up quickly or stored appropriately!

Mine go in mason jars in the door of the mini fridge in the dog room, where I keep my dogs’ food for the week. I pull them out for training sessions, and they go right back in the refrigerator.

If I’m not realistically going to finish up a batch of treats within a week or so, extras will go in the freezer in plastic bags until they’re ready to thaw and move into the refrigerator.

I’ll admit that storage is the tradeoff to being able to make healthy treats that are affordable and enjoyable to your dogs. You’ll need to sacrifice a little space in the refrigerator to keep them from going bad, unlike most commercial dog treats that can just be sealed and kept out in the open or in a cupboard.

However, I’d say it’s certainly worth it. Every time I peruse a pet store and see what they charge for single-ingredient dog treats that are now so easy to recreate from home, I almost feel grossed out by the prices! Plus, my dogs all love the homemade treats just as much as most of the commercial “jerkies” and “chews.”

Starting to dehydrate dog treats from home was definitely one of the better decisions I’ve made recently. And while commercial dog treats do still have a role in my life (hello, dog trainer), I don’t think I could ever go back to just relying on them alone.

Homemade dog treats are healthy, affordable, and easy to make. There’s no reason to not always have them around!