The kitchen has a leave-out list for every food it can cook. Tap a food out and the week rebuilds around what's left. That covers the everyday swaps: a meat you can't buy, an egg your dog can't eat, a grain you'd rather skip. A food allergy is a different job, and it starts with a vet.
Swap one meat for another
Each day, the kitchen cooks from the three most common rows in each group that you haven't left out, moving one step through them. For meat, that's chicken, goat and rohu. Leave one out and the next row moves up:
| You leave out | The week rotates over |
|---|---|
| Nothing | Chicken, goat, rohu |
| Chicken | Goat, rohu, mackerel |
| Goat | Chicken, rohu, mackerel |
| Rohu and mackerel | Chicken, goat |
| Chicken and goat | Rohu, mackerel |
You don't need to change the oil by hand. The plan weighs each day from that day's kcal, so a fish day weighs more than a chicken day.
Two rules from the old DogMealPlan swap sheet still hold. Swap inside a group: meat for meat, vegetable for vegetable. And make one change at a time, so if your dog's stool or skin changes, you know what did it.
Some recipes are built on a particular meat. Chicken and Goat Meat Meal needs both, and the meat-and-fish recipe needs chicken and one of the two fish. Leave out what they need and the kitchen says "Nothing left to cook" and asks you to pick another recipe.
A dog that reacts to chicken
If your vet has found chicken to be the problem, or wants it out while they work things through, tap out more than one chip. The chicken chip is the meat only. Chicken liver, chicken gizzard and chicken heart are separate rows, so tap all four.
What's left:
- Meat: goat, rohu and mackerel.
- Liver: goat liver (kaleji), still capped at 5% of the bowl.
- Other organ: goat heart (dil) and goat kidney (gurda).
Recipes that work without chicken include Balanced Bowl Blend, Tail-Wagging Tasty Meal, which cooks rohu and mackerel in turn, Nutribowl Delight and Vitality Feast. Chicken and Goat Meat Meal and the meat-and-fish recipe won't cook. Egg is a separate food with its own chip, so whether it stays is a question for your vet.
For what it's worth, the food allergens reported most often in dogs are beef, dairy, chicken and wheat (Mueller, Olivry and Prélaud, BMC Veterinary Research 2016). The kitchen cooks no beef, dairy or wheat, so chicken is the one of those on its list.
No egg
Tap Egg out. The plan scales the meat up to cover the egg's kcal, and nothing else needs replacing. There is no calcium supplement to add in its place: the calcium comes from real bones to chew, raw or dehydrated and never cooked, as it does for every dog on the plan.
No grains
Rice is the only grain the plan cooks. You have two routes:
- Pick a recipe with no carb at all. Balanced Bowl Blend, Tail-Wagging Tasty Meal and the day 7 Immune Weekly bowl carry none.
- Keep a carb recipe and leave rice out. Sweet potato (shakarkandi) then takes the carb share every day. Nutribowl Delight, Vitality Feast and the two 2025 meat recipes all work this way.
Either way, the plan weighs the day from your dog's kcal, so the bowl's grams change and the kcal stay the same.
What a food allergy work-up looks like
The test for a food allergy in dogs is an elimination diet followed by a challenge, run by your vet. No blood test has replaced it: tests for food-specific antibodies give results that don't repeat well (Mueller and Olivry, BMC Veterinary Research 2017).
The elimination diet is one food, and only that food, for weeks. Your vet picks a complete diet made from ingredients your dog hasn't eaten before, or a prescription diet made with hydrolysed protein (Merck Veterinary Manual). Nothing else goes in: no treats, no table food, no flavoured medicines, no flavoured toothpaste.
It takes time. In the published trials, more than 80% of food-allergic dogs had their signs settle by 5 weeks, and more than 90% by 8 weeks, so the review's authors recommend at least 8 weeks (Olivry, Mueller and Prélaud, BMC Veterinary Research 2015).
Then comes the challenge: the old food goes back in, one ingredient at a time, under your vet's eye. In more than 90% of food-allergic dogs the signs flare within 14 days of being fed the food that causes them (Olivry and Mueller, BMC Veterinary Research 2020). That flare is the answer.
The kitchen's bowl and an elimination diet
A week from the kitchen rotates three meats, several organs, three vegetables, egg and oil. That's a dozen or more ingredients, changing every day. It's built for variety, which is the opposite of what a trial needs.
So don't run an allergy trial on a kitchen plan, and don't read an itchy week on it as proof of anything. If your vet wants a home-cooked elimination diet, follow their recipe exactly, with their protein, their carb and their supplement. Once the trial and the challenge are done and your vet has named what to avoid, come back and tap those foods out.
Signs to take to a vet
In dogs, food allergy most often shows on the skin: itching, all over the body in about half of affected dogs, with the ears, paws and belly often involved, plus ear infections and skin infections that keep coming back (Olivry and Mueller, BMC Veterinary Research 2019). It can show in the gut too: the same group's review says vets should consider an elimination diet early for dogs with long-running vomiting and diarrhoea (Mueller and Olivry, BMC Veterinary Research 2018).
These signs have other causes as well, so the kitchen can't sort them out for you. Take your dog to a vet if:
- the itching, paw licking or head shaking lasts more than a couple of weeks
- ear or skin infections come back after treatment
- vomiting or loose stool keeps returning, or comes with blood, weakness or a dog that won't eat
If the skin is dry and flaking but not itchy, read the dry, flaky skin record before you change the food.