Composition containing animal parts for production of a fried snack food and method for production thereof

In a method for producing a puffable composition containing animal parts comprising providing dried animal parts, defatting the dried animal parts to a reduced fat content, passing the defatted animal parts through an extruder at sufficiently elevated temperatures and pressures to form a moldable mass, extruding the moldable means into an extruded shape-sustaining form and cutting the form into portions thereof, the improvement comprising admixing a starch with the said animal parts, prior to said extruding step, maintaining the extruder at a temperature where the starch or the starch and animal parts are at least partially gelatinized, and cutting the extruded form into portions thereof and wherein the mixture fed to the extruder has a moisture content between 10% and 35%, a fat content of less than 15% and the weight percent of said starch, based on the mixture of starch and animal parts is from 10% to 75%.