It’s always a pleasure to share these pages with like-minded people.
Rosemary Fotheringham is a passionate Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner supporting other practitioners to do nose-to-tail carnivore.
When she shared with me her post on on realfoodcarnivore.com how to use our Beef Liver Powder to make capsules at home to save our customers money.
I was thrilled. I know you will be, too.
How to Make Beef Liver Capsules
I’ve been making my own beef liver capsules for six years after teaching myself how to do it (because I am a weirdo like that!), and I wanted to share how I make them with you.
Organ meat (called offal) is an essential staple of a nose-to-tail carnivore diet, especially liver and kidney, which are the most nutrient-dense of the organ meats. Gram for gram, liver is the most nutrient dense food on the planet.
Eating liver gives your body a burst of nutrients it needs to do many of the jobs it needs to do:
Why Capsules?
Many people can’t or won’t eat offal as part of their daily diet, primarily because the taste and texture can be unappealing. In that case, supplementing organ meats in capsule form is an ideal alternative.
Wherever you’re sourcing organ meats, quality and sourcing is of utmost importance.
You have two options:
① Buy high quality and properly sourced organ meat capsules.
② Or make them yourself.
Buying capsules is of course more convenient, but 6-8 capsules per day can add up quickly in terms of cost.
If you take a lot of organ meat capsules like I do, it might actually be worth it to invest in the equipment to make your own.
Using whole beef liver from the farmer, the process is messy, stinky, and has to be done over a couple days. But if you have the determination, you can make 800-1000 capsules for just the cost of the capsules (around $15) and the liver ($5-10), making a cost per capsule of 2.5 cents―about a tenth of the cost if you buy pre-made capsules, which are more like $0.25 per capsule.
But there’s also a happy medium. If you want to bring the cost down but don’t want to go through the stinky, messy process of dehydrating the liver, you can actually buy grass-fed beef liver powder to make into capsules.
I was really excited when Grassland Nutrition reached out and asked if I would be interested in them sending me some products for me to try, including their freeze dried liver powder to make my own capsules.
The benefit of freeze drying is that it retains its nutrients (as opposed to my method of dehydrating, where some of the nutrients are lost due to the heat).
I’ve been making my own organ meat capsules for about six years now, and let me tell you making them from the freeze-dried powder is so. much. easier.
I will possibly never go back.
Grassland Nutrition is based out of Australia, and their beef organ products are all top-notch quality, grass-fed and finished.
They have a video about the sources of their product on YouTube.
They also sent me these beef liver capsules, one with plain liver and one with added kelp for extra nutrients (seaweed is rich in minerals, especially iodine, which helps support your thyroid). Lastly, they sent these freeze-dried beef kidney snacks, which can be eaten straight, sprinkled over food, or also encapsulated.
They were kind enough to create a discount code for my readers: use the code realfoodcarnivore to get 10% off your order from Grassland Nutrition.
I got to work turning the beef liver powder into capsules, and was able to make about 400 of them, enough to last me two months!
The beef liver powder is $27, so I calculate that the cost is about $0.08 per capsule (including the cost of the empty gelatin capsules).
Given how much work this saves by not having to puree, dehydrate, and pulverize the liver, I think making the capsules from the powder is the best option in terms of balancing cost and effort.
The cost is about $0.08 per capsule (including the cost of the empty gelatin capsules), less than half the cost if you buy pre-made capsules, which are more like $0.25 per capsule.
How to make your own Beef Organ Capsules
How to make your own beef organ capsules using the Grassland Nutrition beef liver powder.
If you want to start from fresh liver check out my blog on how to dehydrate from fresh.
Encapsulate the Beef Liver Powder
Now that you’ve got your grass-fed beef liver powder, it’s time to make the actual capsules. It can take a little while, but it’s SO satisfying.
Grab your bag of empty gelatin capsules and your capsule making machine.
There are a lot of parts to it and it can get confusing, so watch this video for how to use the capsule maker to make 100 capsules at a time.
Note: the video shows how to pour the separated capsules into the machine and shake it and so they mostly all fall right side up, but I just separate the capsules by hand and put the bottom and top parts into their respective trays.
Once you’ve made the capsules, you can pour them into a large mason jar and store them!
FAQ
About the author
Rosemary. I’m a Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and I’ve had my nutritional therapy practice seeing clients and teaching classes since 2015. I found success with carnivore that I hadn’t found with keto or paleo, and Real Food Carnivore was born to help other support practitioners with the tools they need to help themselves and their clients to eat animal-based. Follow Rosemary’s blog at realfoodcarnivore.com.
