Many year ago when I raised discus, I used to feed them a home-made food based primarily on beefheart, shrimp, spirulina and spinach. I wrote a brief write-up back then describing the recipe. With the recent interest in making beefheart-based food, I decided to dig up the article and post it here. Hopefully, someone will find it useful.

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| Recipe for beefheart mix
| 1993-04-08
|
| Below is a beefheart recipe that I use to make food for my discus. It
| consists mainly of beefheart and shrimp (the kind for human consumption).
| The beefheart is a great inexpensive source of protein and the shrimp
| provides many vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids. Spinach
| is added to provide additional vitamins as well as roughage to aid the
| discus' digestion. In addition, a vitamin supplement is added to the
| mix as well. I've heard of vitamin powder for pet birds being used as
| well as aquatic vitamin drops, but I just use crushed-up human vitamin
| tablets that contains additional supplements of calcium and iron.
|
| Recently, I've modified the recipe slightly with the addition of
| spirulina, a form of blue-green algae. Spirulina is rich in proteins
| and amino acids and is high in carotenoids (carotenes and xanthophylls)
| which aid in the development of color pigmentation when consumed by the
| discus thus enhancing their coloration. For the amount of discus
| food produced by the recipe below, 3 tablespoons of spirulina powder
| should be sufficient. (BTW, pure spirulina powder can be purchased
| mail order from Wet Thumb Aquatics (313-725-0960) or at some health
| food stores in tablet or powder form).
|
| This beefheart mix serves as the primary component of my fish's diet.
| I've also been culturing whiteworms as a live food supplement and
| thinking about starting up a culture of African red wigglers as well.
|
| My discus seem to really enjoy this formula and I've obtained good
| growth rates with it as well. I'm sure other types of fish would also
| enjoy it.
|
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|
| Ingredients:
|
| 1.0 LB. fresh beef heart
| 1.0 LB. shrimp (the kind we eat)
| 1 medium bunch of spinach
| 1 package of unflavored gelatin powder
| 1 or 2 multivitamin tablets (the human kind)
|
| Take the beefheart and trim away all the veins and fat. Grind, chop or
| mince the beefheart until fairly fine. Place the beefheart in a very
| fine seive or straining cloth and rinse under cold water. Try to rinse
| as much of the blood out of the beefheart as possible. This will help
| make the beefheart less polluting to your aquarium water. Squeeze the
| cloth and strain out the water. Remove the shrimp from their
| shells and chop them up as well. Blanch or microwave the spinach until
| soft and chop up. Place these ingredients in a container and add in the
| gelatin (dissolve it in some water first). The gelatin will help
| to bind the various ingredients together. Crush the vitamin
| tablets into a fine powder and add this to the bowl. Mix everything
| thoroughly (easiest to just use your hands). Place the mixture into
| plastic bags, press flat and freeze. Break off small portions and thaw
| in the refrigerator section before feeding.
|
| Except for the shrimp, all the ingredients are very inexpensive. It
| takes a little work to prepare but it is cheaper than buying the
| commercially available discus foods, most of which use some variation of
| this recipe. You can also experiment with different ingredients. Some
| breeders prefer to use turkey hearts over the beefheart. You can also
| include beef liver or scallops. But including some vegetable matter
| will be beneficial to the fish (I've heard of people using squash,
| zucchini, algae flakes, pears, and Jack Wattley has even tried
| bananas). Other ingredients to try are wheat germ, krill, white
| fish and paprika. Use different additives each time you make a batch
| of food for variety.
|
| One note of caution: Although this is an excellent diet for growing
| discus, I've found that feeding beefheart seems to result in higher
| amounts of ammonia, dissolved wastes, etc. So either feed sparingly,
| or (if you're feeding alot for maximum growth rate) make very frequent
| and large water changes to prevent the buildup of nitrates and other
| dissolved organic compounds.
|
| Enjoy!

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To make it easier to break off pieces from the frozen slabs of food, I place the beefheart mixture into the plastic bags and press flat, then take the edge of a ruler and press parallel lines of indentation into the flattened bags before freezing, thus partitioning the mixture inside the bags into square sections. Once frozen, this creates "breaking points" in the slabs that make it much much easier to break off manageable chunks.

For large predatory fish, I prefer to feed them beefheart straight (as part of a varied diet). After trimming away the fat, I cut the beefheart into appropriately sized cubes or strips and place the pieces into plastic bags in one single layer and leave just a bit of separation between pieces. Once frozen, you just take out the individual pieces as needed without having to hammer pieces off!




* Copyright 2005 arowspace. The content of this article may not be reproduced without permission by the author.

EXCELLENT

nice, going to pin this biatch.

sweet

Awesome. Thank you for that!

i had been doing something very similar for feeding my bichirs... using a blender though, and it created a HUGE mess. anyway, just my .02, if you try this at home, dont cut the beefheart TOO fine.

pat

Awesome post ED,

I have made several batches of this stuff now and all my fish love it.

Havn't had any reject it.

Bichirs really love it and so does my 10" Temesis and i have all my baby Tems on it. They are only about 3-3.5" but once this hits the water they are splashing

Only thing i did diffrent is i added some flakes to the mix. Guess you could use pellets also, etc and i know Patrick a former sponsor also added garlic to his supermix!

thanks again Ed

This post has been edited by kdblove_99: Jun 30 2005, 10:28 PM

You're very welcome, Davey.

I'm happy to hear that you are having great success using this recipe with feeding your fish. Thanks for the positive feedback... I greatly appreciate it.

If anyone else has tried this recipe or perhaps it inspired you to formulate your own, please post about your experience here. I would love to hear all about it.

I had great success with this recipe.

I only used zucchini and peas though along with the beefheart.

I found that cichlids inparticular really like this.

Thanks for sharing, not only is it effective its REAL cheap.

This post has been edited by Steve_89: Jul 7 2005, 03:55 AM

Nice!

sweeet i feed my catfish beefheart and its seems quite expensive now when he gets bigger ill definatly use this recipe i love diy fish food!

I've kept discus for eight years now and have found that you don't need beefheart or turkey heart in the mix at all. I've had great success making my mix using market shrimp as the food base and then adding spirulina, peas, spinach, hikari bloodworms, vitamins etc. It's a little more expensive to do it this way but it doesn't foul the tank water as fast and the fish love it! Why feed aquarium fish a food base that does not even occur naturally in water? Plus my discus grew noticably faster when I eliminated beef heart and turkey heart. In addition I found it was easier to ween wild discus and angelfish to the shrimp based mix. I know this can be a trivial topic, especially because folks have been using beef heart and turkey hearts in their food mixes for years, but I'm telling you making a switch to shrimp based food mix is the way to go.