Boiled Chicken For Dogs Recipe (With Green Beans!)
July 8th, 2020
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One of the easiest ways to both improve your dog’s diet and satisfy their taste buds is with some home cooking.
Because our dogs aren’t that picky when it comes to eating “hooman” foods, you don’t need to be a 5-star chef to deliver a 5-star home restaurant experience!
That’s why in today’s recipe, we’re going for the super easy, super simple boiled chicken and green beans for dogs.
This recipe will add tons of extra protein and fiber to your dog’s diet, without going overboard on fat content. This is great for dogs that require low-fat diets.
Moreover, boiling chicken breast allows it to retain a lot of its moisture after cooking, making it nice and juicy for your pup!
Regarding Portioning
For today’s recipe, we base portions off a daily intake of 1,000 calories, which is around what Yuna consumes in a day as a 58 pound Lab.
Since we feed her twice a day, each meal contains approximately 500 calories.
This means that if you follow this recipe word for word, everything in your dog’s bowl at the end will equal about 500 calories.
However, Yuna’s got her own sensitive tummy issues, we like to keep half her bowl dedicated to her special Hill’s Prescription Diet i/d Low Fat kibble, which has been instrumental in helping her through her pancreatitis.
READ: Hill’s Prescription Diet i/d Low Fat Review
That’s why Yuna’s bowl will be half kibble (~250 kCal), half home-cooked (~250 kCal) .
In the ingredients list below, we include 250 kCal of a commercial diet as an ingredient. Should you choose to go 100% home cooked, you can simply double the mandatory ingredients and scratch the kibble.
Scale this up or down proportionately depending on your dog’s typical calorie intake!
Ingredients (per 500 calorie meal)
Get these ingredients in an instant with Amazon Fresh.
- Boneless, skinless chicken breast: ~5oz
- Green Beans: ½ cup (~50g)
- [Optional] 1 Egg
- [Optional] 250 kCal of a commercial diet
Time To Cook!
The following makes 3 meals in one go, so you can immediately serve your dog one portion and pack two more portions for later.
1. Chicken Breasts
Most likely, your chicken breast will not come in 5oz chunks. We are able to get chicken breast by the pound (16oz).
Bring a pot of water to a boil and toss in your chicken breasts. Boil for about 18-22 minutes, for 1 pound of chicken breasts. The exact time will vary based on thickness and quality of the chicken: you may only need 8-12 minutes for butterflied chicken breasts, for instance.
Consider using a meat thermometer to check that the chicken is cooked thoroughly–165F (75C) is the official safe “cooked” temperature.
When the chicken is cooked, remove. You can cut in half to check that the chicken is cooked in the middle. (Note that a bit of raw is totally fine. Healthy dogs can eat raw chicken–their bodies are perfectly capable of processing it).
Finally, use a couple of forks to shred the chicken into appropriate sizes. Measure about 5 ounces of meat per serving, based on our 500 calorie standard.
2. Green Beans
I chopped up about 1.5 cups (~150g) of raw green beans into appropriate sizes and washed them. Be sure to cut off the tips of the green beans since they’re real tough.
Bring a pot of water to a boil and toss in the green beans. Boil for about 5 minutes to maintain their firmness and crunchiness while softening them a bit.
You can cook slightly longer for even softer beans.
Plating
- Kibble: ⅔ cup Hill’s Prescription i/D Low Fat (~222 kCal)
- Kibble: 1 tbsp Taste of the Wild, Pacific Stream (~28 kCal)
- Chicken Breast: 5 oz (~235 kCal)
- Green Beans: ½ cup (~15 kCal)
- [Optional] 1 Egg (~78 kCal)
Sometimes, we add a raw egg to finish. As with many raw foods there is always the risk of salmonella. But provided you buy good eggs, those chances are extremely low and the health benefits outweigh the risks. We only feed Yuna one egg per week maximum anyway.
And that’s it! Boiled chicken and green beans–quite possibly the easiest home-cooked meal you could make for your dog. They’ll love you for it.