Barktastic Chicken Tenders: Healthy and Specially Formulated for Happy Dogs

🐶 I say this every time I write about our homemade dog food, but our dog Nacho is the pickiest eater! It is so hard to create a meal that is both healthy and something he’d deem delicious. Thankfully this is one of those recipes, this is a lick the plate clean kind of recipe. So if you have a picky dog, this is for you, and if your dog will eat whatever you give them, I’m sure they’ll love these too!

These chicken strips are very close to the kind I feed my family, with a few little differences made to benefit our dog. I have been following the guidance of our vet and the book they recommended to us, Complete & Balanced by Hilary Watson, and using the Hilary’s Blend supplement. She’s a veterinary nutritionist based here in Ontario and her book and website are full of useful information.

The only place you can buy Hilary’s Blend (the book or the supplement) is through her website or your veterinarian. Here’s the link to her store (https://completeandbalancedwebstore.com/).

She has also made a very handy recipe builder for dogs! So you can go through the steps and make sure whatever you’re feeding your dog is compete and balanced! You can find that here (https://hilarysblend.ca/RecipeBuilder-Step1.aspx).

Nutritional breakdown of this dog chicken strip recipe from Hilary's Blend Complete and Balanced Recipe Builder. It shows the ingredients and their macro breakdowns, and a feeding guide per 100 grams of the recipe. This shows that this recipe is high in protein and balanced in carbs and fat.
Here is an example of the breakdown of these chicken strips through this recipe builder.

You can change the recipe yield at the bottom to ‘per 1 kg of ingredients’ or per day all the way up to per 20 days! Since Nacho needs 750 calories per day, and this recipe contains 128 calories per 100g, and each chicken strip weighs approximately 40g (I checked), if this was all he ate in a day, he’d need to eat 15 chicken strips! But since he had his scrambled eggs with pork and oils for breakfast, and his peanut butter snack in the afternoon, he only needed 5 chicken strips.

Barktastic Chicken Tenders

  • 2 eggs
  • 1 scoop Hilary’s Blend
  • 3 chicken breasts (raw)
  • 1 cup bread crumbs (be sure to check the ingredients are all dog safe or better yet, make your own!)
  • 1 cup all purpose flour
  • 3/4 tsp safflower oil
  • 1/2 tsp cod liver oil
  • 1/2 cup mashed sweet potato (to serve alongside)
  1. Preheat oven to 375°F. Alternatively, you can prepare thee strips raw and freeze right away to bake later.
  2. Cut chicken breast into strips, or nuggets, or whatever shape you like.
  3. Prepare your dredging station.Pour the flour and breadcrumbs into their own bowls.Whisk egg and add 1 scoop Hilary’s Blend, safflower oil and cod liver oil, and put it into a bowl.
  4. For each piece of chicken; cover in flour, then egg and then breadcrumbs.
  5. Line baking sheet with parchment paper, and arrange chicken strips on it with a little room between pieces.
  6. Bake at 375°F for 20 minutes. Check after 10, and turn over.

The cooking time will vary depending how thick the chicken is cut. Thicker pieces will take longer to cook than thinner ones, so always check the internal temperature of your chicken to be sure it is 165F. 

Always check that any store bought ingredients you use do not contain xylitol or other ingredients are harmful to dogs. It doesn’t take a lot of some of these ingredients to make a dog seriously ill. This is why I prefer to make from scratch, because then I know for sure.

Also, take a peek at our Pawsitively Yummy Cake recipe for special occasions!

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