Homemade dog treats: 5 healthy recipes without sugar

We make little liver sausage treats ourselves – Nami already recognises the sound when the training bag is picked up. Very greedy, very motivated.

You can make healthy dog treats yourself with a few ingredients from the fridge – without sugar, flavourings or preservatives. The five recipes below range from a high-protein dried treat and beef lung for training to biscuits. The most important rule: all treats together stay below 10% of the daily calories.

Treat recipes come up all the time in our community – often because owners want to know exactly what's in their dog's treats. Here are five recipes that work well. If it's mainly biscuits you want to bake: baking your own dog biscuits has eight biscuit recipes with gram amounts, kcal per biscuit and a calculator for how many biscuits your dog can eat a day.

However healthy a treat is – treats should make up less than 10% of the daily calories. That's also what the WSAVA, the World Small Animal Veterinary Association, recommends. A neutered, normally active 12 kg dog needs around 720 kcal a day and can therefore have about 72 kcal in treats, while a 40 kg dog on around 1,780 kcal comes to about 178 kcal. It sounds like a lot, but it soon disappears if every exercise is rewarded during training. The calculator gives you the exact value for your dog: calculate your dog's calorie needs – ten per cent of that is their treat budget.

And first of all: no onions, no garlic, no xylitol (birch sugar), no cocoa, no raisins. Which other ingredients are fine is shown in the A to Z list of foods.

A classic that almost every dog loves. You can get chicken hearts cheaply from the butcher or in many supermarkets with a fresh meat counter.

Here's how: wash 500 g of chicken hearts, halve them lengthways and place them on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Set the oven to 80 °C fan, leave the door open a crack (wedge it with a wooden spoon) and dry for 4 hours. They're ready when they feel like tough leather. Once cooled, they keep for around 4 weeks in a screw-top jar.

A medium-sized dog gets 3 to 5 pieces a day – they're very high in protein. The same works without offal using chicken breast: chicken jerky from the dehydrator.

The vegetarian classic for the biscuit tin.

• 200 g oats (fine)
• 1 large carrot (approx. 100 g, finely grated)
• 1 apple (cored, grated)
• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp sunflower oil

Mix everything together, shape small rounds (teaspoon-sized) and bake at 170 °C for 25 minutes. Then leave them to dry off in the switched-off oven for 10 minutes. This makes about 40 small biscuits.

Would you rather cut out stars and hearts, as in the header image? The oat dough is too soft for that. With wholemeal flour instead of oats, you can roll out a dough made from apple, carrot and egg – amounts and baking time are given with the Christmas cut-out biscuits. For savoury rounds made with oats, try the dog biscuits with oats and chicken liver.

A change for dogs that don't tolerate poultry or beef so well – salmon also provides omega-3 fatty acids.

Mash 150 g of boiled, cooled potatoes. Add 100 g of salmon fillet (cooked, boneless), 1 egg and 3 tbsp of rice flour. Roll the dough out 5 mm thin on baking paper and cut it into squares with a pizza cutter. 180 °C, 20 minutes, turning once.

Storage: because of the fish, only 5 to 7 days in the fridge.

Freeze-drying isn't possible at home, but drying in the oven is. Cut 400 g of beef lung into 1 cm thick strips, lay them on a rack, 80 °C, 5 to 6 hours. The pieces should snap and crumble, not bend.

Fresh beef lung is lean and has around 90 kcal per 100 g. During drying, however, it loses most of its water – dried, 100 g contains many times that amount. Because a single piece weighs next to nothing, it's still well suited to training: better lots of small crumbs than a few large pieces. Store it only once it's thoroughly dried, otherwise it quickly goes mouldy.

Cut a ripe banana into 3 mm thin slices, drizzle briefly with lemon juice (to stop them browning) and dry in the oven at 100 °C for about 2.5 hours. They turn chewy and sweet and keep unrefrigerated for about 2 weeks.

Banana contains a lot of sugar. A 10 kg dog doesn't need more than 2 to 3 chips a day. For dogs with diabetes, it's better to leave them out altogether. If you'd rather bake the banana: banana dog biscuits with just 3 ingredients.

More treats with step-by-step instructions: pumpkin and oat rounds, turkey treats from the oven and carrot chips from the dehydrator.

In summer, the same idea works frozen: freeze yoghurt, banana or unsalted stock in a silicone mould – without sugar, xylitol, chocolate or raisins. Ice cream counts towards the treat budget too. Recipes and portions by weight are in homemade dog ice cream: 5 recipes without sugar.

A good screw-top jar with a rubber seal, labelled with the date. You can reuse sheets of baking paper several times. And a set of kitchen scales – judging by eye almost always leads to too much when it comes to treats.

The DoggoMeal app works out how many calories your dog needs per day and how much of that is left for treats – and, for the main meals, recipes with grams per ingredient to suit your dog's weight and activity. Get the app.

Bake smaller batches. The treats taste best fresh, and it's easier to try out new recipes when the old tin isn't still half full. Every dog has their preferences – finding them out is part of the fun.