Soaking freeze-dried salmon in water, step by step

How to rehydrate freeze dried salmon comes down to plain water. Break the pieces over a bowl, cover them, and serve them as a treat or over a meal once they have soaked. We set no soak time, so soak only what you plan to serve. It is freeze-dried raw salmon, so wash your hands afterward.

Can you rehydrate freeze-dried salmon?

Yes. You can soak our freeze-dried pink salmon in plain water, and that is our guidance, not something printed on the pouch. The pouch itself has no soaking line.

Soaking is optional. The pieces can also be given dry, broken small, and nothing about the product asks for water. If you want a different way to serve the salmon, plain water is the only addition we suggest.

Every bag holds wild-caught pink salmon, and the pieces include skin. None of that changes when you add water. It is the same salmon with a bowl of water next to it.

How do you soak freeze-dried salmon?

Keep the setup short, because there is not much to it:

• Break the pieces over a clean bowl.
• Pour in plain water until the pieces are covered.
• Let them sit.
• Serve what you soaked.

We do not give a soak time, a water temperature or an amount of water, and we would rather say so than hand you a number we cannot stand behind. Look at the bowl and decide for yourself when it is ready to serve.

Snap the pieces small before the water goes in; our listing already pegs them as medium sized pieces meant to be broken into small rewards. Water does not cook anything either. Salmon that went into the freeze dryer raw is still raw in the bowl, so wash your hands once the pieces are in.

How do you serve soaked salmon to a dog or a cat?

For a dog, soaked salmon works the way dry salmon does: small rewards from your hand, or a spoonful on top of a meal. The listing says to crumble the salmon over kibble or a raw meal, and our salmon topper guide covers the topper habit in detail.

With a cat, ask your vet first and keep every piece small. Your vet decides whether salmon belongs in your cat's day and what a sensible portion looks like. We do not publish a cat amount, and nothing on this page should be read as one.

Soaked or dry, it counts as part of the day. Salmon is a treat or a meal topper, and the bag is plain that it is not meant as a complete diet, so the bowl at mealtime stays the main event. Whichever animal is eating, keep a bowl of fresh water out and stay close while they eat. The bag says: "Wash your hands after handling it." That goes for the bowl and the counter too, since soaked salmon was raw before it ever met the water.

How much should you soak at once?

Put in the water only as much as you mean to serve. We give no guidance on keeping soaked salmon for later, so there is no number of hours to report and no fridge rule to quote. If you want a plan for leftovers, ask your vet.

Weigh the dry pieces before they go into the water. The treat budget calculator on our product page is built for dogs and set at 10 percent of a dog's daily calories, and it answers in grams and ounces of salmon from the pouch. That is a dry weight. A bowl of soaked salmon weighs something else, and the label figures were never meant for it. Your vet's figure replaces the calculator's whenever the two differ, and our walkthrough on weighing salmon treats shows how to do it on a kitchen scale.

When you are done, reseal the pouch and keep it cool and dry. The salmon you did not soak goes back in the pouch dry, so it is worth breaking only what you plan to put in the water.

The rest of the ways to use a pouch live on the guides page, if soaking is only one of the things you are trying.