How to Make Chicken and Rice Dog Treats (Solved & Explained!)

Cooking chicken and rice treats for your dog at home has great health and cost benefits for your family’s best friend. Here we will examine two different methods of preparation

Choose the method that best fits your cooking style, your storage needs and your general flow for working in the kitchen. First, we’ll talk about pre-cooking the chicken, and second we’ll look at combining ingredients and then cooking them together.

Precooking the Chicken

As everyone knows, chicken is a great medium to work with whose only drawback is the disastrous results if it is undercooked. Precooking your chicken breasts beforehand helps to keep contamination out of the equation.

Ingredients

For this preparation method you will need

• 2 Chicken Breast (6-8 oz)
• 1 cup of precooked wild/brown rice
• 2 Eggs
• 1 cup chicken stock
• 1 cup flour

Preparation

Fully cook the chicken breast, either using a simple oven bake until the interior of the chicken breast is 165 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Cook 1 cup of rice.

Allow chicken and rice to cool either in the refrigerator or on countertop. It just needs to be cool enough to handle when it’s time to combine and shape ingredients.

Once cooled, combine chicken, rice, and chicken stock and puree in a blender or food processor.

If the mixture has too much excess liquid, mix in flour until the mixture is solid and sticky.

Mix in 1 egg at a time until all eggs are added.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Farenheit. 

Once the mixture is completely uniform, roll it out on a pre-floured workspace in your kitchen. Treats can be any shape you desire but make certain that they have uniform thickness to prevent uneven cooking in the oven. 

You can cut your treats using cookie cutters or roll them out into a fun shape. Bone shaped cookie cutters are a popular option for many DIY dog treat chefs.

Place treats onto a non-stick surface, either covered in wax baking paper or an oil sprayed cookie sheet. This recipe should yield around 60 small treats.

Bake for 25-30 minutes.

The treats will be completely done once their surface is golden brown.

Using Raw Chicken

If you would rather not precook the chicken, there is a recipe available for that method as well. Just be certain you use safe handling procedures to prevent the spread of poultry born bacteria and infection. 

Wash your hands and prevent cross contamination between ingredient types and surfaces by washing often with antibacterial soaps and wipes.

Ingredients

• 4 Chicken breasts
• 2 cups of wild rice

Preparation

Trim any excess fat from the chicken breasts. You may at this time freeze the chicken breasts or not. Freezing and then partially thawing is a method of making raw chicken slightly easier to manage and mold. 

It is not preferable for human consumption but human palettes are slightly more sophisticated than canine taste desires.

Cook the rice.

While the rice is cooking down using a food processor or high speed blender, puree the raw chicken.

Mix the rice with the chicken once the rice is cooked and cooled.

Once the mixture is uniform, either using a hand mixer or simply kneading and folding like a dough, roll it out onto a floured surface.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Farenheit.

You can either use the cookie cutter method described earlier or you can break them into balls and roll them into short sausage shapes. Make certain that none of the rolls are over large, to prevent uneven cooking.

Place raw treats on a non-stick surface cookie sheet, either with wax cooking paper or with an oiled cookie sheet. This recipe should yield between 125 and 150 treats depending on how you portion them.

Bake in the oven for fifteen minutes and then remove the cookie sheet.

Roll all treats over from top to bottom and replace the cookie sheet back into your oven.

Bake for another fifteen minutes.

All treats will have a nice golden color.

Storage and Preparation

You are taking an incredible interest in your pet’s health and that will keep them healthy and energetic, increasing not only the quantity of their life, but also its quality.

Healthy food has one drawback, though, and that is its perishability. Make certain that as you prepare these treats, either with the precooked chicken or the chicken that cooks in the process that you have storage in your freezer for the treats.

Since these recipes yield such a large quantity of treats, you are likely going to be feeding them to your dog over the course of the next few weeks.

On average, cooked chicken does not last for weeks in the refrigerator and it is obviously doomed to spoil outside of refrigeration after just a few hours.

With that in mind, keep a dozen or so treats available in your fridge at any one point in time and freeze the rest to keep them from spoiling before your dog has a chance to enjoy therm.

If you can be mindful of it, simply take a dozen treats out of your freezer a day before they are needed and that will allow the proper time to defrost. 

In a pinch, simply microwave the treats on fifty percent power for a few minutes to defrost them. You may even want to warm up the refrigerated treats for your dog if they happen to be a fairly picky eater.

When selecting your ingredients for this product make certain of a few precautions to take beforehand.

• Chicken stock: make certain that whatever broth you acquire is either low or no sodium. Dogs are much more sensitive than you are to oversalted foods and can experience gastric distress with oversalted food.
• Rice: select a wild or brown rice rather than the bleached white rice. The processing involved in white rice leeches a large amount of the benefit of DIY dog treats out of the finished product.
• Chicken: find your chicken as lean as possible and trim off the fat before you blend it.