Here’s the current (as of 2025-09-30) version of my shrimp food recipe.

I posted my shrimp food recipe a few months ago here. I’ve made several batches since then, tweaking it every time. The most recent batch has powdered floating plants from my tanks.

Here’s V2 of the shrimp cubes recipe. My colonies love this stuff - here’s a picture two minutes after I added it to my blue diamond tank:

feasting

Ingredients

Substitute and/or add any vegetables that you know your colony likes. You want to make sure that you don’t end up with so much mix that it takes more than three months for your colony to finish it all, otherwise don’t worry if you don’t have the exact measurements of each ingredient.

  • One inch long section of peeled cucumber, cut into 1/4 to 1/2 inch slices. I get organic cucumber, but I still peel it to make sure there’s nothing on the skin that can harm my shrimp. Blanch it in boiling water for five minutes to soften it.

  • Half a cup of powdered floating plants (see below). You can substitute spirolina powder (or add some as an extra ingredient)

  • Optionally add blanched squash or any other vegetable your colony likes.

  • One egg + one or two extra yolks, scrambled well.

  • One cup of water. If you’re blanching th

  • 1 tsp garlic powder

  • 1 tsp paprika

  • 1 tablespoon of egg shell powder (see below)

  • Agar Agar

  • A flat takeout container like the ones grocery store sushi come in

There are a couple of ingredients in this recipe that you’re going to have to make before you can make the shrimp cubes. Fortunately, they’re easy to make.

Egg Shell Powder

Two egg shells make enough powder for several batches of shrimp cubes. I keep it in an old vitamin bottle.

  1. Cook something that uses a couple of eggs and save the shells
  2. Boil the empty shells for 10-15 minutes to sterilize them
  3. Remove the membrane from the shell (optional), and rinse the shells clean
  4. Bake the shells in the oven on a baking sheet at 250F / 125C for 25 minutes
  5. After the shells cool, grind them with a mortar and pestle until it’s a fine powder. You can probably blitz the shells in a food processor, but I haven’t tried that. You want a fine powder so there aren’t any sharp edges that could harm the shrimp. It’s much easier to grind the shell in batches of small pieces than to try and grind an entire eggshell at once.

Floater Powder

I have Red Root Floaters, Salvinia Minima and Duckweed in my shrimp tanks. They do a great job using up the nitrogen compoumds in the water and my shrimp like to graze on the biofilm on their roots.

They grow so fast that I have to pull handfuls of plants out of my tanks every week or two or they completely cover the surface and shade out the other plants in the tank, so I wanted to see if my shrimp would eat them and put them (in powdered form) in my latest batch of food.

  1. Line a baking sheet (one of the ones with raised edges) with parchment or aluminum foil and put a wire cooling rack in it. This lets the hot air in the oven hit all sides of the plants
  2. Spread the floating plants in a single layer on top of the rack. If you make the layer too thick, air won’t get at all parts of the plants and it’ll take longer to dry them out.
  3. Set the oven to 250F/120C and bake the plants until they’re dry and crumbly. I meant to bake mine for 20m but I got distracted and they ended up drying for an hour. You could put them outside to dry, but that takes a couple of days and I don’t have that kind of patience.
  4. Crumble the dried plants to powder. My mortar and pestle were in the dishwaster so I used my fingers - if they don’t crumble easily, they aren’t dry enough - put them back in the overn for another 5-10 minutes.

Instructions

  1. Add 1 tsp Agar Agar powder to a cup of water and stir constantly while bringing it to a boil. If your Agar Agar has different directions on it, follow whatever it says to get the consistency of jello. If you blanched vegetables to add into the food, use the blanching water, it has nutrients that were leached out of the vegetables during blanching
  2. Once the water is boiling, stir in all the ingredients. Be thorough, you don’t want them clumping up
  3. Keep simmering the liquid for 1-2 minutes, stirring constantly, until it starts to thicken.
  4. If you have an ice cube mold that makes small cubes (I found one at Amazon that makes cubes that each hold roughly one tablespoon), pour it into the tray, otherwise pour it into a plastic to go container. Don’t fill it more than 1/2 inch (roughly 12 mm) deep.
  5. Let it set at room temperature. It usually takes 30-60 minutes to firm up enough to unmold the pieces or cut the sheet of food
  6. If you used a to go container, cut it into cubes roughly 1/2 inch square.

I like to make smaller cubes. If the colony is big enough you can feed it multiple cubes - that will let more shrimp get at the food without squabbling.

Notes

  • Don’t worry about exact measurements of any of the ingredients except the Agar Agar
  • You can add fish food to the mix, just powder it first. If you do add fish food, either don’t add something with bloodworm in it or use a dedicated pan.
  • You can either keep it in the refrigerator for a few weeks or freeze it for at least three months, that’s how long it takes for my colonies to go through a batch.

Never put bloodworms into anything you plan on using to prepare food for people later. Not your blender, not your ice tray, not the pan, nothing. 20% of people can develop severe allergies to bloodworms from even a small exposure, sometimes severe enough that it triggers a shellfish allergy as well.