Nutriment Gently Cooked Medallions: Chicken review

All four land in our Outstanding band, and the spread between the strongest of them and the rest is slight. That gap is worth keeping in perspective. Fresh food is the strongest company in our whole scoring and the typical fresh recipe lands in our Outstanding band as well, so holding that band here means keeping pace with a demanding field. All four read Outstanding on every pillar, value included. What separates them is how the analysis balances, because the ingredient lists give you nothing to choose between.

Ingredients, as declared: 87 % chicken (66 % meat, skin, heart, liver), carrot, 3.0 % courgette, 3.0 % chicory, hemp oil, salmon oil.

The meat share is 87% in all four recipes, and each label opens it up. The beef names muscle at 17% alongside tripe, kidneys, lungs, liver, heart and fat. The chicken puts 66% meat with skin, heart and liver. The lamb names 36% muscle with lungs, tripe, fat, liver and heart. The salmon is 40% belly with minced salmon behind it. Offal at that level is a raw feeder's shopping list, cooked through and pressed into a disc.

Gently cooked sits between raw and a tray. The heat is low enough that nothing is extruded or retorted, and the food lives in the fridge or freezer. That is why it looks and smells like food. Moisture runs from 62.1% to 69.2% across the range, so the daily weight in the bowl is several times what a dry food would ask for.

The plant side is deliberately restrained. Chicory shows up in three of the four, bringing inulin along as a prebiotic, and broccoli, carrot, courgette, pumpkin, apple, blueberry and peas take turns depending on the recipe, mostly at a few percent apiece. Nothing here is bulking the food out.

The fats are named, which matters more than it sounds. Hemp oil runs through every recipe and salmon oil joins it on the Beef, Chicken and Lamb, so those three carry fish even though the front of the pack says nothing about it. The Salmon recipe is the exception in reverse, using hemp oil alone and keeping every animal ingredient to the single fish.

On a dry matter basis the four look quite different from one another. The beef is the most evenly balanced at 41.3% protein and 28.8% fat, and the chicken sits at 38.5% protein and 39.1% fat. The lamb and salmon push further still, with fat at 45.8% and 47.0% against protein at 43.6% and 45.3%. The carbohydrate estimate falls to zero on the lamb and salmon and reaches only 18.0% on the beef, so starch is not what fills these medallions.

The added panel is dosed per kilo and printed in full, with vitamins A, D3 and E ahead of iron, zinc, copper, manganese, iodine and selenium. The figures rise and fall a little between recipes to match each one's energy. What you will not find anywhere is a gum, a bulking agent or a colour, and for a food that has to hold its shape in a fridge, that restraint is worth noticing.

Chicken at 87%, and unusually for this range two thirds of the whole food is chicken meat, declared at 66% with skin, heart and liver making up the balance. It is the densest recipe at 192 kcal per 100g, so portions run smallest here, and courgette and chicory at 3.0% each sit beside the carrot on a very short plant list.

The Beef and Chicken are £9.99 a kilo and the Lamb and Salmon £10.36. All four come in 800g packs.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats roughly 437 to 505 grams a day depending on the recipe, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That comes to between £4.36 and £5.21 a day. The Chicken, densest of the four, needs the smallest portions.