How to Stuff a Kong the Easy Way
Food stuffed interactive toys, such as Kong dog toys, are frozen miracles of love wrapped with a sweetly exhausted dog! If you’ve never given your dog a food stuffed Kong, you’re missing a wonderful opportunity to provide mental enrichment, which wears your dog out.
For those who have used Kongs before, you know stuffing them can be a bit challenging. If you’ve ever tried stuffing peanut butter inside a Kong toy with a butter knife, you know the struggle is real. To make this process much easier and quicker for pet owners, I’ll share my four tips to teach you how to stuff a Kong within minutes.
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1. Use a Muffin Pan
Once a week, I gather up all of my dogs’ Kongs and stuff them with food. Filling each dog toy individually is such a waste of time, and it gets so dang messy.
Giving credit where it’s due, my husband pulled out an old muffin pan and placed a toy in each hole. He literally made an instant Kong dog toy holder! Good job hubby! Click and treat! 😉
Once each toy is lined up in a muffin pan, I squeeze or stuff food with ease. The best part is there’s minimal mess! Aside from using it as a Kong holder, you can also use a muffin pan to freeze leaky food stuffed toys. Just carefully place the muffin pan on a flat surface with the food stuffed Kongs in your freezer and voila!
2. Glue With Peanut Butter
Let’s chat about leaky food stuffed toys for a minute. Leaky food stuffed toys make a mess in your refrigerator, freezer and even your favorite rug. An easy way to prevent the food from leaking is to plug the holes with peanut butter.
Serving as an adhesive, peanut butter can prevent watery ingredients from leaking out. When stuffing a Kong with watermelon or broth, plug the hole with peanut butter and freeze for 2 hours. Then, stuff the moist foods into the toy. Freezing the Kong before stuffing it with moist food will allow the peanut butter to set, so all those lovely sticky ingredients remain inside the toy.
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3. Make Your Own Pastry Bag
Stuffing Kong dog toys with pumpkin, mashed sweet potatoes, canned dog food, yogurt or soaked dehydrated dog food is difficult. It’s almost impossible to slowly spoon this wet stuff inside a toy. Save valuable assembly and cleanup time by making your own pastry bag.
To make a pastry bag:
- Place the food stuffing ingredients inside a plastic zip bag.
- Squeeze the mixture toward one corner of the bag.
- Snip off the tip.
- Squeeze food stuffing into the toy.
You can make large batches of stuffing and pipe these mixtures into 20 Kongs within 5 minutes—yes, I’ve timed it! 🙂
4. Soak and Wash Kongs
In my opinion, the worst part of giving food stuffed toys to my dogs is cleaning them. Cleaning Kongs can take forever. Instead of scraping out leftover food residue with a butter knife, I throw all toys into a sink filled with hot water and dishwashing detergent, and let them soak overnight. The next morning, I place each toy on the top rack of my dishwasher and wash with my dishes.
Afterwards, each Kong is clean as a whistle, disinfected and ready to be stuffed again. Now, I would only place rubber Kong toys in the dishwasher; I don’t believe plastic ones would fair so well.
Don’t wait. Give your dog a food stuffed Kong today! Your dog will love you for it!
