Baking Bouchon - Recipe 70: Dog Treats

My little Sconnie boy has been waiting for this day for almost a year.  He FINALLY gets to be the recipient of some Bouchon Bakery treats.

For a dog who never gets fed from the table or the counter (except when my dad is around when I know he sneaks food to the granddog), he has a very keen sense of knowing when I'm cooking something that he would like or something that will kill him.  The dog never fails to appear when meat is brought into the house, out of the fridge or freezer or onto the stove, oven or grill.  He also appears 100% of the time when I am making something with chocolate.  While his little nose is going a mile a minute he is still very polite and has never once stolen food and he's actually quite terrible about cleaning up what I drop on the floor.  He usually looks at it and then looks up at me like I'm trying to trick him.  He's a good boy.  I've jinxed myself, haven't I?

The second these chicken livers entered the front door, Sconnie was aware.  I set the bag on the floor while unloading the rest of the groceries and returned to the kitchen to find his entire face inside the bag with snout nose twitching fiercely.  He knew they were for him because there was no way I'd eat anything that smelled that bad.

The meaty base of these dog treats is bacon and chicken livers.  Cooking the bacon made my house smell delightful and made CA come running to the kitchen to find out what kind deliciousness I was preparing.  Sorry, not for you.  Then I cooked the chicken livers which made my house smell like something had died and made me want to gag.  Grinding up the bacon and chicken livers together into a paste didn't help.

I recovered enough to add in flour, cornmeal and chicken broth to make a very brown, very smelly, very dog-friendly dough.  Luckily, I already had a dog bone cookie cutter lying around which I used to make the epitome of dog treat shapes.

The treats went into the oven to bake at a very low temperature for a very long time... it takes 3 hours to dry these suckers out!

I'm usually a big fan of ketchup, but there's something about brushing a ketchup glaze on chicken liver dog treats that almost made me toss my cookies.  It was a nasty smelling combination.

The verdict?  Well, someone waited very patiently for his treats....

At first he was a little skeptical... I think it was the ketchup glaze.

But after a little coaxing, he gobbled up the first one and asked for seconds.  Then he asked for thirds.  Then he asked for fourths which I did not give him so he proceeded to check the carpet for crumbs.

Sconnie is just like his mama and chose to share some of his treats with his friends.  Apparently bull dogs and lab mixes aren't as skeptical of ketchup glaze as catahoulas are and they gobbled them right up and asked for more.

Enjoy!
Julie