Homemade Chewers for Dogs

Our dog Coco's diet is a lot healthier than ours. He is no longer eating any processed food. Occasionally we buy store bought treats for him, but those are only dried liver or sweet potatoes with no other added ingredients.

He is not a big fan of chewing. If he is given a piece of dried food, he will hold it in his mouth to moisten it then swallow it whole as soon as it is soft enough. But we really want him to chew on something to keep the teeth clean, as he doesn't exactly find teeth brushing fun. So I made him these chewers with beef tendons.

I can only find theses tendons from the Chinese supermarket. Cook them whole first as they shrink a lot. Sometimes I cook them using the broth left from cooking his foods for added flavor. Here is how:

Ingredients

6 pieces of beef tendons

How

1. Put all the tendons into a big pot and try to lay them flat in little layers.
2. Fill the pot up with water, or homemade broth if available, up to half of the top layer of the tendons.
   
3. Turn up the heat and bring it to a boil. Then turn down the heat and let it simmer for 20-30 minutes with the lid on, and stir occasionally. The bigger the tendons, the longer it should simmer, but don't cook it for too long as we don't want to boil out the nutrients.
4. When done, remove from heat and drain off the water. Then dry them using one of the methods described below.
5. Once the tendons are dried, let them cool to room temperature. Cut them into smaller size if you like. Then store them in ziplog bags in the freezer or fridge. 
6. To serve, if stored in freezer, thaw in microwave before serving.

To dry the tendons, I tried the follow two ways and they both work for me:

Baking: Bake the tendons single layer in an 375F oven for 30 minutes.

Air dry: Leave the tendons on a cookie sheet in single layer. Let them sit on the counter-top for 24 hours.

The weather here is now cold and dry so the second method works fine for me. But if you are concerned, stick with baking.