So I’ve been 5 different flavors of sick for the past few months and because of that I haven’t been able to take as many pictures and videos of my birds. So to make up for that I’m going to show everyone how I make my bird bread! Most of my birds hate eating all of their fruits and veggies and I found this to be a good way to trick them into eating them.Keep in mind that I made enough bread for 10 parrots to last me about 3 weeks, so change the amount of the ingredients if you need less. Also Candy wasn’t out with me while I was baking, she only was out for pictures and I recommend not baking or cooking while your bird is in the kitchen.
Things you’re going to need:
An oven
A glass cake pan
A big mixing bowl and spoon
A food processor
A scrapper
A few butter knives and a paring knife
A box (or 2) of cornbread mix and whatever the mix may need (milk and eggs)
3 kinds of fruit, 3 kinds of veggies, and 3 fun extras
Now first, you’re going to need to go shopping for your ingredients, but what to get? I go by a 3x3x3 rule, that’s 3 fruits, 3 veggies, and 3 fun extras. I try to get most of my stuff fresh but frozen can work too and you can freeze the fresh stuff if you want to get a good deal on a sale. Keep in mind that most of the ingredients are going to need to go into a food processor, so if you do buy frozen fruit or veggies give it time to defrost.
For this bird bread I’m going to use apples, bananas, and a mix of blue and black berries. Other fruit that works are pears, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, and grapes. Avoid any citruses, melons, and anything overly soft or juicy. Make sure to pit and core your fruit before processing them and blue, black, and raspberries should be good to put in without processing them.
My veggies this time are carrots, spinach, and broccoli. Other good veggies are cauliflower, kale, green beans, peas, asparagus, romaine lettuce, and most other leafy greens. Everything but the peas will need to be processed and the leafy greens can take a long time to do.
For fun extras pick something that your birds enjoy the taste or texture of and has some healthy fats and proteins for them. For this batch I’m using oatmeal, canned pumpkin, and chopped up walnuts and almonds. Other thing you can use are canned sweet potato, flax seeds, unsalted sunflower seeds without the shell, raisins and other dried fruit, chopped pecans, chopped cashews, and other chopped tree nuts. Stick to the baking aisle or produce for your nuts and dried fruit to avoid getting any with salt or sugar added to them.
Switch up the fruit, veggie, fun extra mix for every batch of bread to make to keep if from getting bland. Try to avoid using more than 3 of each to avoid having crumbly bread and if you do, like I did, use a little less to avoid this problem.
First thing you need to do is preheat your oven to the temperature that’s on them cornbread mix. Follow the instructions on the box and mix your cornbread until it’s nice and smooth.
Next I added the oatmeal and the canned pumpkin. I chopped about 10oz of nuts for this batch and mix everything in until it’s nice and even.
Next I added the fruit. The berries were left out for a bit to defrost so they’ll bake better and I used about half of the berries that are shown in the picture. I used 3 small apples and cored and processed them for the mix. Normally I try to use bananas with a lot of brown spots since the browner the bananas are the riper and more flavorful they’ll be but don’t worry if you can only find yellow bananas they’ll work too. You’ll need to mush your bananas before adding them to the mix. I mush my bananas by squeezing and squishing them before peeling them.
Now time for the veggies! I processed my carrots and broccoli at the same time and chopped them very fine since most of my birds hate both of them. I used half a bag of spinach and it can be a pain to chop it up. After everything is chopped up add it to the mix and mix it until smooth.
The best way I found to mixing this kind of bread is to pull the mix up and out from the bottom of the bowl with the spoon.
Time to grease up those pans with some coconut oil. Since I live in New Jersey and it’s 30 degrees outside my coconut oil is as hard as a rock. To grease your pan take a paper towel and rub it inside the jar of coconut oil then take the towel and rub it along the inside of the pan. You might need to do a few coats depending on how hard it is to get the oil out of the jar.
After your pans are good and greasy pour 1 ½ to 2 ½ inches of mix into the pans. Use your scraper to get the rest of the mix into the pan, I use a hand scraper from my cake decorating days and I almost get every last bit of mix out of the bowl with it.
After the mix is in the pans throw it into the oven. Since I do 2 pans at once it takes about 40 to 50 minutes for my bread to bake fully. Your time may be different if you made less than me, live at a higher altitude, or because of your oven. Check your bread every 10 minutes or so by stabbing a butter knife into the center of the bread. When it comes out clean than your bread is done!
After your bread has time to cool cut it up into pieces for your flock to eat. When you cut the pieces they shouldn’t be falling apart while you scoop it out of the tray and should keep its shape nicely.
After you serve your flock their bread you can refrigerate or freeze the leftovers to save for another day. I give my flock bird bread 2 or 3 times a week as a fun snack.
