- Hi, I'm Reefman, and this week we're going to go through
making your own frozen fish food.
Fish food is really expensive if you buy it online
because you'll have to pay for shipping and handling,
the actual food itself is expensive,
and it's just much easier to go to your local
seafood market, buy some stuff,
whatever looks good, and make it yourself.
For example, all the food that I'm going to use
here today cost only about $17,
which is about as much as one little packet of food
that you're gonna get on frozen food
from either your local fish store or online.
When you're looking at your grocery store
or your seafood market, I would recommend looking for things
that you can get whole, not just fish filets.
If you think about it, the fish filet is really
just going to be the muscle from the fish,
whereas if you get shrimp, whole shrimp,
then you can include the guts and the stuff
that you wouldn't normally eat.
Or octopus, you can get whole octopus
and then you don't need to worry about missing ingredients
nutrient-wise because the whole animal is there.
So let's go over our ingredients,
and you can get whatever you want,
whatever's on sale at your supermarket,
but I got whole shrimp, not shelled,
so we'll have to shell those.
I like to get whole food, whole animals when I can
because it gets the whole digestive tract
and all the innards are still there.
Then we got some clams, these are muscles
from New Zealand I think on the shell
because I didn't need the two pounds of shelled ones.
I got some fish eggs.
These are basically smelt fish eggs.
Small fish love these kinds of things.
And then I also got some baby octopus,
which is another whole food item.
And then don't forget, you can add things like vitamins.
This is just Vita-Chem by Boyd Enterprises,
but you could use Selcon, stuff like that works just great.
And then some nori for my tangs.
So, making fish food is really about the size
of the items that you're feeding your fish.
They need to be the right size,
and since you're making it yourself,
you can make them whatever size you want.
So if you have big tangs, you can have big food.
If you have little, tiny anthias,
you can put mostly fish eggs and stuff like that in.
What I like to do is take the food
and grind it up in a food processor.
You'll end up with some pretty unidentifiable mush,
which is totally disgusting to humans,
but absolutely amazing to fish.
I'll show you how I did it.
So I just used my food processor with a blade attachment.
Be careful, it's sharp.
And then I add a handful of nori to it,
and this is untoasted, just raw nori.
You can get it at supermarkets.
We'll close that up, and we'll just pulse it a few times.
This is really, like you know how big your fish are
and what they're gonna want,
so pulse it to be the size that you're gonna need.
(food processor pulsing)
How easy was that?
So now all we have to do is go ahead
and mix it all together.
So I'm gonna take our unidentifiable
gray octopus mush and dump it in a bowl,
and we'll get rid of these bowls on the side.
Then we've got our clams, and we'll put that in there.
And we've got some shrimp,
and then some nori.
To that, I am going to add a little bit of water.
This is just RO water, like you would use for your top-off.
Really, this is just to get it all to actually mix together,
'cause it can get pretty dry.
Then I'm also going to add some fish eggs.
These are not fancy caviar eggs.
You can just get these in your seafood market,
but my fish love them.
And this whole thing only cost $3, so it works out.
A lot cheaper than your caviar.
So once that's all in a mixing bowl,
just go ahead and mix it together,
and we'll try not to get it everywhere.
If you're not careful or you try to do this
in an electric mixer, your nori is gonna go everywhere,
and if you try to do this in an electric mixer,
your fish eggs are gonna get all ground up,
which is not what you want.
So I'll mix all this together.
Your wife or significant other,
this would be a great time for them to walk in
and see you doing this in their kitchen,
and I guarantee you they will be disgusted.
You can tell them you're making dinner.
So once that's all mixed together,
we can add some vitamins as well.
I sometimes use Selcon.
Vita-Chem was on sale for me this time,
so they're getting Vita-Chem this time.
And we'll just dump the whole bottle in.
We wanna make sure it's really well seasoned,
and we'll mix that in, too,
get that all through.
You can find many recipes for this kind of stuff on forums.
REEF2REEF has a bunch.
Really, this comes down to whatever you can get
that's not overpriced at your market at the time
and that you fish like to eat.
If you don't have any tangs, you don't have stuff like that,
then you don't need to put any nori in.
I do have tangs, and my fish like nori.
Just about every reef fish is omnivorous,
which means they'll eat plants and animals.
So once it's mixed, all you gotta do
is put it in some Ziploc bags.
I would recommend keeping it thin
in the Ziploc bags and not too thick
because if you get it too thick,
it's really hard to back out of the Ziploc bag.
We're gonna use these to freeze the food.
You can also go and get
little ice cube trays.
Those work great, and then you get little cubes
of frozen food instead of a sheet of frozen food.
You can see it's lovely and stringy,
but that'll be okay because after it freezes,
we're going to to cut it up into chunks,
and so some strings here is okay.
Try to get it all in the bag
because this is going in your freezer.
Then we'll just sort of mush it down,
and it'll be super gross and disgusting.
Not too much in a bag, otherwise it's gonna be hard
to get back out and get all the air out.
It'll help prevent freezer burn.
This will be good for several months in your freezer.
So that's one.
So let's see what they think of this mix.
(slow techno music)
And there's gonna be a big glob of octopus there,
so let's get that out, okay.
(slow techno music)
So clown fish like it, blueface angelfish likes it,
or the bluespotted angelfish likes it,
Achilles tang, kole tang, starki damsel.
I think it's a success, and since you have ground it up,
you have a variety of particle sizes,
so your coral is also gonna get some food out of this,
which is also important.
(slow techno music)
It does stay together a little bit more in the tank
and doesn't cloud the tank so much once it's frozen,
so you can keep that in mind.
It's kind of the worst case, but yeah.
So I really recommend making your own fish food.
It's so much cheaper, it'll save a lot of time...
Well, not a lot of time, you'll save a lot of money,
and your fish will, I think, appreciate it.
So hopefully you enjoyed.
Let me know what you put in your fish food
if you make your own.
Don't forget to subscribe,
and I will see you next week, bye.
(slow techno music)