I'm having success with a homemade mess of a recipe, so I'll share.
I was given a meat grinder - the kind local hunters use to make sausages. I bought a large enough bag of black soldier fly larvae, which are sold online inexpensively as chicken food. I run them through the grinder after wetting them, and get a lovely gross paste. I add pureed pea and carrot baby food, paprika, and gelatin to bind it. In some recipes, I throw in avian vitamins, ground up dulse (a local seaweed), or spirulina. If I could get astaxanthin (good for reds) at a reasonable price, it would go in.
You can also make this with shrimp run through the machine, or a stick blender til it's a paste. Old time aquarists made beefheart recipes because they couldn't get appropriate ingredients and had to improvise. At the time, it was really clever. I scratch my head at our still using such an improvised recipe, outdated since food shipping modernized 50 years ago. Beefheart is just good enough. Actual insects, or carefully chosen non oily seafood are far superior for fish to digest. All I've done here is take the 1930s beefheart recipes and tweak them for better base ingredients.
I put a scoop of this fragrant mush into a ziplock bag and flatten it til it's thin enough to easily break off pieces. I let the gelatin set then freeze several bags, about 6 months' worth. I feed 50 tanks of fish with this for a relatively low cost. They get it three or four times a week, in rotation with whiteworms, frozen zucchini rounds and wingless fruit flies - other cheap but complicated foods.
I've been doing versions of these recipes for 30 years, especially since I'm allergic to bloodworms and get swelling it I touch it, and frozen brine shrimp are mostly water (frozen daphnia is mostly shells). Frozen mosquito larvae are great, but I'm not farming mosquitoes. The neigbours would be here with pitchforks.
You can make several pounds of food at about half the cost of buying frozen.
I was given a meat grinder - the kind local hunters use to make sausages. I bought a large enough bag of black soldier fly larvae, which are sold online inexpensively as chicken food. I run them through the grinder after wetting them, and get a lovely gross paste. I add pureed pea and carrot baby food, paprika, and gelatin to bind it. In some recipes, I throw in avian vitamins, ground up dulse (a local seaweed), or spirulina. If I could get astaxanthin (good for reds) at a reasonable price, it would go in.
You can also make this with shrimp run through the machine, or a stick blender til it's a paste. Old time aquarists made beefheart recipes because they couldn't get appropriate ingredients and had to improvise. At the time, it was really clever. I scratch my head at our still using such an improvised recipe, outdated since food shipping modernized 50 years ago. Beefheart is just good enough. Actual insects, or carefully chosen non oily seafood are far superior for fish to digest. All I've done here is take the 1930s beefheart recipes and tweak them for better base ingredients.
I put a scoop of this fragrant mush into a ziplock bag and flatten it til it's thin enough to easily break off pieces. I let the gelatin set then freeze several bags, about 6 months' worth. I feed 50 tanks of fish with this for a relatively low cost. They get it three or four times a week, in rotation with whiteworms, frozen zucchini rounds and wingless fruit flies - other cheap but complicated foods.
I've been doing versions of these recipes for 30 years, especially since I'm allergic to bloodworms and get swelling it I touch it, and frozen brine shrimp are mostly water (frozen daphnia is mostly shells). Frozen mosquito larvae are great, but I'm not farming mosquitoes. The neigbours would be here with pitchforks.
You can make several pounds of food at about half the cost of buying frozen.
