Okay.
So, you want to feed your snails and fish something a little bit more natural in their
diet, especially your snails and other invertebrates, things like zucchini, cucumber, carrots, remaining
lettuce, stuff like that.
High in calcium and, you know, just in general good veggies.
And one of the popular ones are zucchini but today I’m going to be using cucumber which
is quite similar.
And in order to feed it to them properly, you have to do, as called, blanching and it’s
actually very very simple.
So, firstly you need to bring a pot to boil.
Once it’s boiling, we will take the zucchini, or in this case the cucumber, place it inside,
and we’re going to let them cook for about four and a half minutes.
And that’s going to more or less sort of make them softer.
And it’ll also make them sink to the bottom so they don’t float.
Now, what do you do right after it’s done, is you have another pot and you fill it with
ice water, make it super cold and basically when this is done cooking, we will place the
strainer full of cucumber into the ice water and that will immediately stop the cooking
process.
You let it sit there for about a minute or two, let it cool down, take it out, and voilà,
you have blanched cucumber or zucchini.
Okay.
So the blanching process is almost done.
We’re skipping ahead.
I paused the video.
One thing I want to know is you’ve noticed I cut the cucumber into, what we call coins.
Basically, they’re just little pieces that, well, more or less resemble the shape of a
coin.
So, I just chop them up into pieces.
And the beeper is about to go off to one.
We turn of the heat; I’ll let it strain a little bit.
We bring it directly to the cold ice water and then we let it sit.
And this will immediately stop the blanching process, or the cooking process.
And after we let it sit for a little bit, we can start feeding this to our fish and
snails.
Now, one thing I want to know is you notice some of them are beginning to sink, which
is what we want, that’s part of what the blanching process will do.
And it won’t be immediate; maybe a few minutes before all of them start to sink.
We got some sinking right over there; we got some sinking over here.
And this way you won’t have to anchor it down with anything, it’ll just automatically
just sink to the bottom where all your fish and snails can get to it.
So, now that pretty much all the coins have sunk to the bottom, we can remove this and
feed it to our little fishy buddies.
Okay.
So, now we are in the fish room and we have our blanched cucumber.
So, let’s go ahead and take one piece, toss it in.
Huh huh, it sinks.
And now the fish will kind of start pecking at it and if they like it, they’ll eat it.
The zucchini was an instant success.
This is a cucumber this time and it seems like the fish are liking it already.
So, it’s a good supplement to their diet.
Just throw a few coins in there.
The will get eaten.
I can assure you of that.
I had several coins of zucchini in here and they lasted about a day or two.
And your snails will get to them once the fish are done pecking at it and they will
continue to peck at it for quite some time.
That’s pretty much it.
It’s not hard to blanch food for your fish.
Now some blanching recipes say to add salt.
I do not add salt.
These are all fresh water fish and snails and I don’t know how the salts going to
affect anything so I just leave it out of my own recipe.
But hey, thanks for watching guys.
I really hope this little tutorial helped you.