Episode 14 – Salad Bones and Carob Peanut Butter Crunch Balls

Episode 14
August 30, 2010
Salad Bones and Carob Peanut Butter Crunch Balls

This is a very special episode!  In this video, I show you how to make homemade doggy treats as a way to celebrate the newest member of our household!  That’s right – we got a dog!  We adopted our Beagle, Punkin, from the Rappahannock Animal Welfare League on August 16th.  He’s adjusting really well to our home and I’m happy to be able to share one of my passions with him – food!

In this episode I had to ask a friend for help and she recommended a book she had recently bought: Doggy Desserts: Homemade Treats for Happy, Healthy Dogs and I found two recipes of particular interest.  For one they required few ingredients which typically means they’re easy.  I tried to find one that would be a tasty treat and one that would be a little healthier.  The recipes I found were the Salad Bones and the Carob Peanut Butter Crunch Balls.

…and while I’m recommending books I highly recommend The New Food Lover’s Companion which my friends and I have dubbed “The Food Lover’s Dictionary” because it’s just that – a dictionary and useful guide to the food and wine world.  Well worth it’s weight in gold for any foodie.

Getting back to the video, carob is a chocolate substitute that has greater use in the Mediterranean, Egypt, and Middle East.  Carob is great for pets because it lacks theobromine, the chemical in cocoa that is poisonous to dogs and cats.  Carob is also great because it is naturally sweet (in fact Wikipedia claims it was used as a sweetener before sugar cane and sugar beets were) and has an interesting flavor.  Though I only used it once in school I took the time to get reacquainted and tasted a couple of the chips right out of the bag.  It has a savory flavor outright, in fact my friend said it tastes like a bouillon cube, but then fades into a sweet chocolaty ending.  Since I mentioned The Food Lover’s Companion here’s what author Sharon Tyler Herbst has to say about Carob:

The long, leathery pods from the tropical carob tree contain a sweet, edible pulp (which can be eaten fresh) and a few hard, inedible seeds.  After drying, the pulp is roasted and ground into a powder.  It is then used to flavor baked goods and candies.  Both fresh and dried carob pods, as well as carob powder, may be found in natural food and specialty food stores.  Because carob is sweet and tastes vaguely of chocolate, it’s often used as a chocolate substitute.  Carob is also known as Saint John’s bread and locust bean.

As I said in the video, the author of the book recommends avoiding products with added sugar and sodium so be sure to seek out your health food and organic sections and read the labels!  Just because a product is in one of these sections doesn’t mean that they are low salt or low sugar.  I recommend visiting Whole Foods or Trader Joes if you can.

The Salad Bones recipe was fairly straight-forward.  While I was making the dough I thought it would be more cookie-like but it actually was more biscuit or bread-like in consistency.  In fact, after they were baked they resembled little rolls or even puffy crackers.

The Carob balls were a little difficult.  They were a mess and the carob didn’t melt as nicely as chocolate does.  When chocolate melts it’s almost like water it’s so thin but carob stayed pretty thick.  If I make it again I would try thinning it down with heavy cream or vegetable oil, or even heating it to a higher temperature.  If you’re going to try this make sure you experiment on a small amount before you tamper with the rest of the carob.  Keep in mind too that these recipes are supposed to be on the healthier side so if you do add heavy cream try to be conscious of that.  I would also highly recommend making the carob balls about a quarter of the size of mine – they came out way too big and I ended up cutting them into quarters before giving them to Punkin.

I do have to admit that Punkin was not interested in the snacks at first which is why at the end of the video he is conveniently no where to be seen (though you can hear him panting and click-click-clicking across the floor).  I think this was because he had just eaten his dinner so he wasn’t hungry but when I gave him one of them later he gobbled them right up.  I also have to admit I was curious to how they tasted and so I ate one of each.  Yes, the Aubergine Chef ate homemade doggy treats!  Let me tell you, they are pretty tasty!  The Carob balls are truly addicting – I don’t know how Punkin resisted eating them the first time he was presented with them.  The Salad Bones are tasty bites but are a little plain.  For humans, I would recommend a garlic butter dip – yum!  Remember dogs should not eat chocolate, garlic, onions, raisins, and grapes – so keep the garlic butter for yourself.

Anyway, here are the recipes for the Salad Bones and the Carob Peanut Butter Crunch Balls.  Enjoy the videos below and if you ever end up making them please let me know on here or on Facebook!  Thanks, as always, for watching!!!