Cook three or four days at a time. That's the fridge's limit: USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) gives cooked food 3 to 4 days in the fridge, and 3 to 4 months in the freezer for best quality (FSIS, Leftovers and Food Safety). A week from the kitchen is two cook days, or one cook day and a freezer.
Three or four days in the fridge, the rest frozen
The 3 to 4 days start the day you cook, not the day you open the container. A dabba on day 5 is past it, even if it smells fine. Two ways to fit a week inside that:
- Two cook days. Sunday for Monday to Wednesday, Wednesday evening for Thursday to Sunday. Less freezer space, two sessions.
- One cook day. Cook all seven days on Sunday, keep Monday to Wednesday in the fridge, and freeze Thursday to Sunday the moment they've cooled. Each night, move the next day's container down to the fridge.
What to set up before you cook
- A kitchen scale that reads in 1 g steps. The plan is in grams. A katori or a cup doesn't measure.
- One container per day. Steel dabbas or glass boxes with lids, each labelled with the day and the date on a strip of masking tape. If your dog eats twice a day, split the day's container at serving time.
- A big pan with a lid for the meat, and the pressure cooker for the rice.
- Eggshell powder, if you use it. It's optional: a pinch on top of the bowl, never weighed. Rinse the shells, dry them in a low oven for about 10 minutes (an OTG does this well), grind them fine in a mixer jar, and keep the powder in a dry jar with a lid. The calcium comes from real bones to chew, raw or dehydrated and never cooked.
Cooking the batch
The meat is soft boiled, never pressure cooked: the cooker overdoes it and leaves it hard to digest. The pressure cooker is for the rice.
- Chicken or mutton. Boneless chunks, no salt, no onion, no garlic, no masala. Onion and garlic never go in a dog's bowl in any form (the toxic foods record has the full list). Bring a big pan of water to the boil, add the meat, put the lid on, turn the gas off, and leave it 30 to 45 minutes. Cut mutton small; it needs the full 45. Cook each meat in its own pan. Don't brown or fry anything first.
- Organ. Heart (dil), gizzard (pota), goat kidney (gurda) and liver (kaleji) go into the water first, since organ spoils fastest, and the meat follows once the water rolls again.
- Fish. Rohu or bangda, into water that has just boiled, lid on, gas off, until it flakes. Let it cool until you can handle it, then pick out every bone with your fingers. Cooked bone of any kind never goes in the bowl, because it splinters.
- Rice and sweet potato. Kani rice in the pressure cooker until it mashes. Shakarkandi whole in the cooker until a knife slides through, then peeled and mashed.
- Vegetables. Palak, lauki, kaddu, gajar, steamed or given a short cook until tender.
- Egg. Boiled and peeled.
Portioning each day by weight
The plan weighs meat, organ and vegetable raw, and cooked carbs after cooking. Cooking changes the weight of meat, so a batch needs one extra step.
- Add up the raw grams of one meat across the days you're cooking, and weigh out that total.
- Cook it, then weigh it again, cooked.
- Give each day its raw grams multiplied by cooked weight ÷ raw weight.
Say the plan gives 260 g, 240 g and 280 g of raw chicken on three days. That's 780 g raw, and it comes out of the cooker at 550 g. Each day gets its raw figure × 550 ÷ 780: 183 g, 169 g and 197 g. Do the same for the organ and the vegetables.
The kcal in the plan were counted from raw meat, and some of that meat's fat melts into the cooking water. Split the water between the days in the same proportion so it isn't poured away.
Then, into each day's container: the cooked carb weighed straight onto it, the egg, and the oil from the plan, stirred in last.
Cooling it fast
FSIS's rule is to get cooked food into the fridge within 2 hours, and within 1 hour when the air is above 32°C (FSIS, Keep Food Safe). A kitchen in an Indian summer is often above that, so in May the clock is one hour.
A full pressure cooker left to cool on the stove takes far longer than that. FSIS's advice is to divide large amounts into shallow containers so they cool quickly, and it says hot food can go straight into the fridge. To speed it up, set the filled dabbas in a parat of cold water with a few ice cubes for 15 minutes first.
Your fridge should hold 4°C or below and your freezer -18°C or below. A fridge thermometer costs little and tells you what yours actually runs at.
Freezing, thawing and warming
Freezing. Freeze each day in its own labelled container with the lid on. Don't freeze the whole batch in one box, because you can't thaw a single day out of it.
Thawing. In the fridge, never on the counter. Move tomorrow's container down each night; a single day's portion is usually ready by morning, and if it's still icy, give it more time in the fridge. FSIS says food thawed in the fridge can be refrozen, with some loss of texture. Food thawed in the microwave should be used straight away (FSIS, The Big Thaw).
Warming. Food that has stayed cold can go in the bowl cold. To warm it, stand the steel dabba in a pan of hot water for a few minutes, or warm the meal's share in a microwave-safe bowl for a short time and stir it, since microwaves leave hot spots. Touch it before it goes down: warm, never hot. Warm only the meal you're serving, never the whole day's container twice.
The bowl. Whatever your dog leaves goes back in the fridge or in the bin within the same 2 hours, or 1 hour above 32°C. Wash the bowl after each meal, as you would your own plate.
Raw meat in an Indian kitchen
Dog food gets the same kitchen hygiene as the family's food, from the same FSIS guidance.
- Don't wash raw chicken or mutton. FSIS advises against it, because the water carries bacteria from the meat onto the sink, the counter and whatever is drying beside it (FSIS, Washing Food). Many Indian kitchens wash chicken out of habit; trim it on the board instead, and put it straight into boiling water.
- Wash your hands with soap for 20 seconds after touching raw meat, before you touch the vegetables or the dabbas.
- Keep a separate chopping board for raw meat. Afterwards, clean and sanitise the board, the knife and the counter.
- Store raw meat in a sealed box on the lowest shelf of the fridge, so it can't drip onto cooked containers.
- Thaw frozen raw meat in the fridge, the same way as the cooked portions.
When the power goes
FSIS's figures for an outage: an unopened fridge keeps food cold for about 4 hours, and a full freezer holds its temperature for about 48 hours, or 24 hours if it's half full, as long as the door stays shut (FSIS, Keep Your Food Safe During Emergencies).
- Keep both doors closed. Every opening lets the cold out.
- Keep the freezer full. A full freezer holds longer, so fill the gaps with bottles of water frozen ahead of time. If your fridge runs on the inverter, this matters less, but it still helps.
- When the power comes back, check the frozen containers. FSIS says food that still has ice crystals, or is at 4°C or below, can be refrozen.
- Throw out fridge containers that sat above 4°C for 2 hours or more.
- Never taste or smell a container to decide. FSIS is clear on this. Go by the thermometer and the clock.
If your area loses power for long stretches, cook smaller batches more often, so less food is at risk in any one outage.