Homemade Dog Biscuits – Healthy Treats

Daily Dog Biscuits – Debra Crawford

With three very spoiled dogs in the house, I go through a lot of dog biscuits and I was spending a lot of money on them.  Some the  pups liked and some they didn’t, but one thing was common, they all smelled like the box when you opened them, stale and dry.  Except I have to say, the Trader Joe biscuits that smell like molasses, but unfortunately, none of my dogs care for those.

So I did a lot of research online to come up with a list of ingredients that would not be harmful to my dogs and went through several batches of disgusting trials.  I tried adding bacon bits, ugh, dipping them in bacon fat – gross and they went rancid, grinding meat into them, another gross attempt and hard to cut into shapes because of meat fibers, just a host of yuck.

Finally, I came up with this basic recipe that my dogs love.  I occasionally change it up by substituting chicken or beef broth for the liquid or adding quinoa in place of flax, but they seem to like the basic ones just fine.  They eat them every day.  I even got a little crazy with this recipe for Christmas and decorated them with carob chips and a little white chocolate (white chocolate actually contains no chocolate that could be harmful to your dog).

DAILY DOG BISCUITS – by Debra Crawford
Makes about 75 biscuits depending on size

1/2 Cup Peanut Butter
2 Eggs
1/3 Cup Canola Oil
1/2 Cup Dried Milk (or 1 1/2 Cups low-fat milk)
1 1/2 Cups Water (if you have used low-fat milk above you do NOT need this additional liquid).
2 Teaspoons Vanilla Extract
1/2 Cup Rolled Oats
1/3 Cup Flax Seed (grind it in a coffee grinder) or you can use 1/2 Cup Cornmeal, or increase oats to 1 cup
1 1/2 Cups Whole Wheat Flour
1 1/2 – 2 Cups All Purpose Flour

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Have several cookie sheets available so that you can cook these all at once.

In a medium-sized bowl, whisk the peanut butter, eggs, oil, dried milk, water, vanilla, oats and ground flax-seed until thoroughly blended.  Add the flour and stir into a dough.  Dough will be sticky.

On a well floured bread board (use the all-purpose flour for this) place 1/2 of the dough.  Sprinkle with a generous amount of flour and knead lightly, adding more flour until the dough loses its stickiness and is smooth.  It will still be rather soft however.  Roll out to 1/4″ and cut into shapes with cookie cutters or a pizza cutter.

Move to cookie sheet with a spatula (pancake turner) and then bake the whole batch at 400 for 20 minutes.  Turn off oven, crack the door of the oven about 1″ and leave biscuits in the oven until dry, several hours.  Store in airtight container.

Go ahead and try them yourself, they are perfectly edible and taste like a whole wheat cracker.  Let me know how you and your pups like them!

Dog Biscuit Ingredients

Flax Seed Before Grinding

Dog Biscuit Dough Prior to Kneading

Dough after kneading

Pizza Cutter Option

Cookie Cutter Option