How to Make Ice Cream for Dogs

When summer arrives and temperatures climb, it's completely normal to see our dog looking a little hot and bothered — or quite a lot, depending on where we live. Leaving clean, fresh water available at all times is obviously a must, but... what if we also gave them something tasty and refreshing to help them cope with the heat a bit better? Yes, we're talking about a good dog ice cream, easy to make and utterly irresistible.

Can Dogs Eat Ice Cream?

They certainly can, and not only that — they love it. But commercial ice creams, the ones we humans generally eat, aren't remotely healthy for our dogs (they aren't really for us either).

Many commercial ice creams can give them diarrhoea, vomiting or even a glucose spike, since dogs don't have the sweet tooth we humans do and commercial ice creams are loaded with sugar. Obviously, if they eat a little nothing much will happen, but it isn't the healthiest thing for them.

The best option is to make some delicious ice creams for our dog ourselves. They're very simple to make and we can eat them too. Remember that even though a homemade ice cream is good for a dog, if it eats it too fast or in an excessive amount, it will end up with an upset stomach.

You should give it to them to lick and work through slowly. If your dog swallows it whole, it might be better to make a larger shape to prevent that, or simply hand it over bit by bit yourself. Remember never to put sticks or any object inside the ice cream that could hurt them.

Dogs used to a Kong (the toy) can also have the ice cream inside it.

Homemade Dog Ice Cream Recipes

The base of every recipe you'll find here is dog-friendly yoghurt. It has to be plain and unsweetened — in other words, with as few added ingredients as possible. The more natural the yoghurt, the better for our dog.

Yoghurt Ice Cream Recipe

We can make a simple yoghurt ice cream by putting the yoghurt in the freezer and waiting for it to set. Once it's frozen, we just peel off the container and let our dog enjoy it.

Some people prefer not to give their dog that much yoghurt, whether because of its size or for any other reason. We can mix one yoghurt with half a glass of water and whisk it by hand or with a blender until we get a more or less even liquid. We'll pour this liquid into freezer moulds, in whatever size we like, and that way we'll have a whole batch of yoghurt ice creams ready for our dog.

Optionally, you can also add a little cinnamon, since it's very good for dogs and will also give the ice cream a special smell and flavour that our pup will find irresistible.

Fruit Ice Cream Recipe

This recipe is exactly the same as the previous one, except that we'll add whichever fruit our dog likes best to make the ice cream even tastier. And healthier too, since certain types of fruit are very good for our dogs.

Some examples of healthy fruits are:

• Banana
• Apple, without the core or seeds
• Pear
• Berries
• Melon - Watermelon

The recipe consists of adding whole pieces of fruit to the ice cream, whether it's the plain yoghurt one or the yoghurt-and-water one, before freezing it. That way the fruit ends up embedded in the ice cream and our dog will be happier still, if that's even possible.

If we'd rather not use whole pieces of fruit, we can blend them together with the yoghurt or the yoghurt and water and freeze the resulting liquid, which will obviously have a great fruity flavour and all of the fruit's nutritional properties.

Biscuit Ice Cream Recipe

This is without doubt the most intuitive recipe of all: we simply add biscuits to the yoghurt before freezing it, or blend them in with the yoghurt if we'd rather they didn't stay in chunks.

The biscuits can be dog biscuits or natural ones — always avoiding industrial biscuits loaded with sugar and/or preservatives.

Chicken Ice Cream Recipe

This time we won't be using yoghurt for the recipe, because all we need is a little chicken broth, with or without pieces of cooked chicken. Remember that if you add chicken it has to be meat only — never give your dog cooked bones.

This dog ice cream recipe is very simple: we boil chicken meat (breast, thigh, whatever we like) in a little water, without adding salt or any other ingredient. Once a delicious chicken-flavoured broth has formed and cooled down, we can pour it into freezer moulds.

If we prefer, we can also add pieces of chicken meat along with the broth and freeze it all together. It's without doubt a very tempting ice cream for a dog — and where we say chicken, we could just as easily say beef, rabbit or whatever your dog's favourite meat happens to be.