Homemade cat food

Pork Loin Novel-Protein Mince

Pork is the forgotten meat in cat cookery, which is precisely what makes it useful — a cat that has reacted to chicken, beef and fish all its life has usually never met it, and a protein the immune system has never seen cannot yet be allergic to it.

Difficulty
Medium
Time
40 min
Makes
5 portions

🧺 Ingredients

  • 300g pork loin, all visible fat trimmed away
  • 60g cooked pumpkin or butternut squash
  • 1 tbsp unsalted pork or chicken broth
  • 1 tsp salmon oil
  • Taurine supplement to your vet's dosing (pork is lower in taurine than heart or dark poultry meat)

👩‍🍳 Method

  1. Trim the loin hard. Pork fat is far richer than poultry fat and is the usual reason a cat brings this one straight back up.
  2. Cut into 2cm cubes and simmer gently in unsalted water for 20 to 25 minutes, until no pink remains anywhere in the centre of the largest piece.
  3. Cook pork thoroughly and without exception — unlike beef, it must never be served rare or raw to a cat.
  4. Let it cool, then pulse in a processor to a coarse mince rather than a paste. Cats read texture as much as flavour, and a novel protein is accepted more readily when it feels like food.
  5. Fold through the pumpkin and enough broth to loosen the mixture.
  6. Stir in the salmon oil and the taurine supplement once the food is below hand temperature, so neither is degraded by heat.
  7. Introduce it as a tenth of the bowl on the first day and increase over a week — a novel protein is only useful if the cat will actually eat it.
Nutrition: Pork loin is a genuinely complete muscle protein and unusually rich in thiamine, a B vitamin cats burn through faster than most mammals and cannot store well. What it does not carry is taurine in the quantities heart or thigh meat provides, which is why the supplement is listed as an ingredient rather than an optional extra.

📝 Notes

Keeps three days refrigerated or two months frozen in portions. The point of a novel protein is diagnostic as much as culinary: if your vet has suggested an elimination trial, the whole exercise collapses the moment somebody in the house offers a chicken-flavoured treat, so tell everybody before you start. Pork gets an undeserved reputation among cat owners — it is not toxic and it is not unusually fatty once the loin is trimmed, though cured pork in any form is not on the table.

A new protein lands better in a familiar bowl — change one variable at a time
A new protein lands better in a familiar bowl — change one variable at a time

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⚕️ Before you cook for your cat

  • Homemade food must be balanced. Cats need taurine, and deficiency causes heart and eye disease.
  • Treat recipes are supplements to a complete diet, not a replacement for it.
  • Check any new ingredient against the toxic-foods list, and ask your vet before switching diets.

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