Terrific Tofu

Why feed tofu to our dogs?

Tofu is extremely high in protein and contains all of the essential amino acids your dog’s body needs. It also provides fats, carbohydrates, and a wide variety of vitamins and minerals. It appears odourless and unless cooked with various ingredients, it is relatively tasteless (to us); but once your dog has been offered tofu, they will crave it! They can smell the individual amino acids and our little Ruff can hear me opening the fridge from anywhere in the house and he races in when he smells the tofu coming out!

It can be fed in the cooked food or raw to your dog and makes an ideal training treat, or it can be cooked or ‘scrambled’ with nutritional yeast for an extra tasty and wholesome meal.

What tofu do we recommend?

We recommend purchasing Nigari tofu such as the Tofoo.co range which is tofu that has been made from soya milk curdled with brine (Nigari.) The brine is actually magnesium chloride, a byproduct of extracting salt from sea water. Nigari is what remains when salt is extracted from seawater. It is a mineral-rich coagulant used to help tofu solidify and keep its form.

This particular tofu is superior to feed to our dogs as it contains the extra essential nutrients. It is expensive if feeding regularly (to us and our dogs), so possibly worth looking at making it yourself – The Tofu Box.

Why did the ancient Chinese make tofu?

The very first tofu blocks were made from curdled soyabeans over 2000 years ago by the ancient chinese. Rumour has it that a Chinese cook discovered tofu by accidentally mixing a batch of fresh soy milk with nigari.

The majority of Chinese adults suffer from a deficiency of lactase, the enzyme needed to break down the lactose in milk and the common trigger for lactose intolerance; so by fermenting the soyabean, they found a way of cultivating all the goodness and being able to digest such a highly nutritious protein-rich food.

A mild lactose intolerance occurs in our dog’s digestion too as although dogs are not completely deficient in the enzyme to digest dairy products, some dogs will react very strongly to milk protein with signs of diarrhoea, very itchy ears or generalised scratching.

When I ask clients what they use to feed their dogs their wormers/medication or supplements, 90% of them will reply that they use cheese (it is never confessed first – only if prompted, will they acknowledge how much their dog loves cheese and rushes to the sound of the opening fridge and rustle of packets in the cheese drawer!) We’ve all done it – I confess too to it before I turned vegan! Cheese and cheese snacks are addictive to humans and if we have been sharing our guilty secret with our pets, we have very easily turned them into little addicts too!

Far healthier and kinder to turn your dog into a tofu addict!!