Beef Heart Preparation Guide

Beef Heart
​It's What's For Dinner

We offer our discus a varied diet. However, one of the varied resources we rely upon is our own beef heart blend. Beef heart is a cheap high protein food source which is low in fat. High protein diets assists discus in their growth. While we use beef heart with our discus, many aquarists choose to use beef heart mixtures with a wide array of fish species including: angelfish, cichlids and oscars to name a few.

To perform our beef-heart mixture you will need:

• Beef Heart
• ¼ lb (113 grams) of Peeled Shrimp
• Diced Garlic
• Women's Once Daily Vitamin​
• Freezer Bags

Step 1: Cut the beef-heart into sliced pieces removing all tendons, fat and gristle from the heart. It is important to remove the fat and gristle as it can be detrimental to your fish.

Beef Heart can be obtained from the specialty beef section of most major supermarkets. If you have difficulty finding it, check with local butchers in your area.

Make sure to remove all tendons and ligaments from the heart.

We've found that cutting the beef heart into slices about 1 - 2 inches (2.5 - 5 cm) in thickness aids in the grinding process later.

Step 2: Add the sliced beef heart into a meat grinder. Periodically mix in your peeled shrimp into the grinder as well.

Step 3: Once the beef heart and shrimp has been completely ground, you will need to add roughly one tablespoon (15 mL) of diced garlic to the mixture. Discus fish are notorious picky eaters. The garlic flavoring is used to entice the fish to eat.

Step 4: Add a crushed Women’s Once Daily Vitamin. This will provide trace nutrients beneficial to the discus diet.

Step 5:  Once everything has been thoroughly mixed together, place the mixture into freezer bags. When filling the bags, we attempt to have the beef heart mixture thinly spread throughout the bag. This enables us to easily break the mixture into pieces once frozen.

Make sure to blend all elements until the ingredients are spread uniformly throughout the mixture.

One of our beef heart mixtures lasts approximately 3 months. If you currently have discus or are debating on keeping discus in the future, we highly recommend feeding them your own beef heart mixture. This insures that you are feeding your rapidly growing discus a high protein diet which you know exactly what it contains.
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Another added benefit of producing your own beef heart mixture is that you can also tweak the recipe as necessary. Sometimes we will exchange the ¼ lb of peeled shrimp with a whitefish such as halibut. Others choose to add additional ingredients such as hard boiled egg yolk, peas or spirulina. Remember what is best for fish is a varied diet. Changing ingredients within the beef heart mixture will assist in providing your fish with varied nutrients. In addition to our beef heart mixture, our discus are also provided varying pre-made products such as Cobalt Brand Discus Flake Fish Food. Just keep in mind that a varied diet is key!

That’s it for this time, Remember to Keep Krill’in!