This recipe can be used as a base, when making you own discus food. This food is good to use as the main food for discus, but I don't recommend to ONLY feed this food, but to also feed other types of food. (Read more about this in my article about discus food.)

If you let food leftovers remain uneaten in the aquarium, for long periods of time, this homemade discus food can easily ruin the quality of the water. Therefore, you should be extra careful not to overfeed. You should vaccuum out any food leftovers, if there are any.

The ingredients proportions are not fixed, but can be varied and you are free to add ingredients, or exchange them, as long as you have sufficient knowledge about what might be good (and what might be bad) for the discus, and/or any other fishes, that may live in the same aquarium. Personally, I never make a batch with exactly the same ingredients and proportions. Among other things, it depends on the price, availability and quality of the ingredients at different times.

The use of this recipe is totally at your own risk!

Ingredients:

Equipment:

You may want to use other equipment. That is up to you. :)

Preparation:

1. Crush and pulverize all the tablets into powder, using a kitchen mortar. Then mix the powder from the tablets with the spirulina powder, inside a jar. (Be careful with the spirulina powder, it's very colorful and may cause you trouble cleaning it up, if you happen to spill it.)
   
   
2. Rinse and clean the beef hearts. It is important to remove ALL visible fat and cartilages etc. Cut the pure beef heart meat into small pieces, then squeeze and rinse these in water, until the water no longer gets red with blood. Squeeze out and discard excess water. Grind the small pieces of pure beef heart meat through the meatgrinder, into a bucket.
   
   
3. Chop off and discard the rostrum (the sharp spike between the eyes) and the antennae from the shrimps. Grind the shrimps (still with their shells, including shrimp eggs etc.) and also the crab meat into the bucket. This can be done while they are still frozen, because they are brittle when frozen, but if you want, you could gently thaw them in a microwave.
   
   
4. Mix the content in the bucket with the large spoon and at the same time gradually sprinkle and mix in small amounts of the spirulina and crushed tablets, until all the powder is mixed throughout the whole content of the bucket.
   
   
5. Carefully thaw the green peas in the microwave so that they are no longer frozen (unlike the shrimps and crab meat the green peas are hard as a rock when they are frozen, so they must be thawed) and then grind them into the bucket. Here, I can also recommend the use of a food processor, or a mixer, to really make only tiny pieces of the peas, because some larger bits of peas can slip through the meat grinder, because they are so slippery.
   
   
6. Carefully thaw the plate fillets in the microwave, press out the excess water from them. Cut them into small pieces and grind them into the bucket.
   
   
7. Crack some eggs. Discard the eggshells. Break the yolks* and mix the yolks with the whites and some spinach in a bowl and cook in the microwave until the eggs have barely coagulated. Pause and take out the bowl and mix it up if the coagulation is uneven to avoid overcooking. When one batch is finished, put it in the bucket. Repeat until all the eggs and all the spinach is in the bucket.
   
   *If the food is for adult discus, I recommend not to use all the yolks. The yolks contain a lot of fat. For young fish I recommend using all the yolks. For food mix meant for feeding older fish, some of the yolks can be discarded.
   
   
8. Peel the bananas. Discard the peels.
   
   
9. Grind all ingredients through the meat grinder twice. (The ingredients that according to the instructions above already have been ground once, will be ground a total of three times.) Mix the food thoroughly with a large spoon after each grinding.
   
   
10. Put some of the discus food into a plastic bag and flatten out so that you get a 3 mm thick layer of the food in the bag. If the bag doesn't have so called "zip-locks" it is preferable not to flatten out the food throughout the whole bag, but leave a few cm at the opening that you can then fold around the edge of the bag. Do the same with the rest of the discus food (if you want to, you can weigh the content to get a specific amount in every bag) put the bags into the freezer as you finish filling and flattening them.

How to feed:

Take out one of the bags. Break off a piece of the discus food and feed to your discus. If you want to, you can feed your discus by holding the piece between your fingers in the aquarium, while the discus eat from it. Alternatively, you can break the piece into several small pieces and spread those small pieces out in the aquarium, to make sure all discus in the aquarium can eat some of the food.

Comments:

You can use a mixer, or a food processor, instead of a meat grinder, but then you should have more water in the food, so that you do not break the mixer (or food processor). Unfortunately, that gives a consistency that is not as good as if you use a meat grinder. To make the consistency better, you can add some stabilizer such as gelatine, or agar agar, but be extremely quick when adding and speedily mixing it into the food to prevent the forming of lumps. Some people warm up the entire batch of food mix, before adding the stabilizer, to avoid lumps.

Examples of other alternative ingredients:

The frozen shrimps (prawns) Pandalus borealis, with shells, can be exchanged for a deshelled version, or other species of shrimp, either with, or without, shells.

Oyster meat, clam meat, various plankton, pig heart, ostrich heart, turkey heart, moose heart (elk heart), lean moose meat (lean elk meat), lean ostrich meat, various vegetables, various sorts of shellfish.

Canned vegetables, especially canned peas and canned green beans, may be used. They are softer and have and grainy consistency that easily falls apart, making them easy to grind, mix and mash, but are more expensive per weight and some of the nutrients may probably be lost, compared to frozen (or fresh/blanched/cooked) vegetables. I'm not sure what alternative is better for digestion and intestinal health in discus. If you use canned green beans, check for and remove any accompanying sprigs, that sometimes may have accidentally ended up in the can.

Fillets of other species of fish can be used, but I suggest to avoid extremely fatty fishes (like halibut or eel).

I don't advice using aquacultured salmon, because of both ethical and health reasons, but wild caught salmon is an option, although it may create an oily film on the water surface after feeding. If you get problems with an oily water surface, but still want to continue using salmon in the food mix, I suggest adding a surface skimmer, or a surface overflow.

Krill meal (pulverized dried krillshrimp) can be used both as a main ingredient and to soak up excess liquid, especially if the mixture has become too watery. If you have difficulty finding where to buy the krill meal, I suggest contacting a fishing store that sells bait.

Insect meal (usually pulverized dried crickets, or pulverized dried soldier fly larvae). Insect meal can sometimes be found in health stores.

Astaxanthin can be used in small amounts as a supplement in the food mix, but most dry discus foods sold on the market today already have astaxanthin added. If you regulary feed your discus such dry foods, there is probably no need to add astaxanthin in the food mix. Astaxanthin is a powerful antioxidant and a colorant that can have various benefits in small amounts. However, especially if you keep yellow discus (and a few other color variants), you may perhaps not want to overdose astaxanthin, since it can, for example, turn yellow discus into orange discus.