I'd like to start preparing my own frozen foods

[AJ356]

Hi,

I've just spent a good amount of time looking to see if I can bulk buy frozen food for cheaper in the UK. I don't like the idea of buying frozen food through the mail, and never have tried it before........................... Perhaps, a blessing in disguise, is that there are not any great deals out there anyway for bulk buy of things like blood worm, mysis, brine shrimp, daphnia, copepods etc. Not that I can see. No great savings to be made.

My average costing here in the UK for a standard 100g of frozen food is about £2.75, so that's about $3.70 US dollars and $5.19 Canadian dollars for @GaryE who I hope responds to my topic.

My fish are all Central American cichlids; Convicts, Sajica, Cutteri, Myrnae - from newborns up to about 3 inch big

I've identified a cheap food chopper that according to the reviews can handle the type of foods I will be using https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ninja-NJ1002UKBK-NINJA-Chopper-Black/dp/B01B81R34U/?tag=fishforums-20

My question is on ingredients for my type of fish and whether I need to use a "binder"?
I plan to keep the food quite flat, like a "slab" and just break bits off, but I am a complete newbie to this.

How about ingredients?

- I'm pretty sure raw peeled king prawn is on the agenda
- What about white fish? There is a lot to choose from at my store; cod, haddock, sea bream, hake, basa
- Could i use some salmon as well?
- Is Mackeral off the agenda as too oily/fatty?
- I've not been good giving my fish vegateables over the years, should I include peas?
- Anything else that's worth adding like spirulina or garlic?

Thank you!

 

[Rusty_Shackleford22 137]

Gelatin would be your best "binder". Good gelatin is around 70% digestible protein. Agar or pectin are also alternatives buy gelatin is the top choice.
The advantage of making your own food is you can tailor it so suit your fish. Given the fish you listed you would probably want to make an omnivore diet with both protein (meat) and veggies. The downside is fish like most predators eat whole food items. Whole insects, chitin and all. Whole fish including whatever is in their gut.

I know you guys in the UK have had a hot hot summer. Here in the U.S. there are vendors that ship large quantities of frozen food, but not in the summer months. It's an autumn and winter thing here. Perhaps contact some vendors and see if they start shipping frozen food starting in Oct./Nov. time frame.

There is a fun factor to making your own food though. Experimenting with different ingredients to see what your fish will eat. Perhaps adding color enhancing ingredients.

 

[GaryE22 137]

I've discovered soldier fly larvae sold as chicken food - a reasonable price over here in Canada.. I run it through a meat grinder with a little water. You can also use small northern shrimp, frozen, the same way. Or mix them. Add a vegetable - if you are using gelatin, you can use pureed baby food peas and carrots. For colour, mild paprika or astaxanthin algae powder. If you have avian vitamins at hand (I'm not a chicken farmer - my daughter has a canary) they are water soluble and useful.


For larger chunks of fish, you can put white fleshed fish through the grinder/blender. It never gets small enough for my fish. Mock crab works, by the way, and is very cheap here. You can puree romaine lettuce, zucchini (courgettes to you) with the skin off, de shelled peas (lots of work), spinach that you've frozen or blanched... lots of possibilities. Freeze it in very thin slabs so you can manually snap chunks off.

I can make and freeze a kilo of food for about the cost of 500 grams of frozen.