How to Make Baby Food
This post contains affiliate links. We may earn a small commission on purchases at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting us.
Disclaimer: I am not a pediatrician/medical professional. This post is for informational purposes only.
A baby’s nutrition in the first few months and years of life is so much more crucial than many people realize. It is recommended (if possible) to breastfeed until at least six months of age. From there, the mother can continue to breastfeed while incorporating nutrient-dense solid foods and purees. Truly, it’s more beneficial to shoot for a year of breastfeeding since food before one is mainly just for fun. Some babies do catch on to eating foods more quickly than others, but for those babies who aren’t as interested in purees and solids, it’s important to make sure they are getting plenty of breastmilk for that first year of life. This ensures their little bodies are getting the nutrients they need to grow and for their brain to develop properly. Breastfeeding also plays a huge role in helping baby establish their gut microbiome (healthy bacteria) setting them up for good gut health for the rest of their lives.
In this post, we will walk through how to make baby food in the easiest way possible. We will discuss exactly how to incorporate making nutritionally dense baby food into your normal food preparation routine or just your weekly routine in general.
Why Make Baby Food Homemade?
So, why make your baby’s food homemade? This is something we’ve touched on in a previous post, but it’s important to reiterate. When you prepare your baby’s food homemade from scratch, it means you know exactly what ingredients are going into your baby’s food. Also, it means you can control what the ingredients are and how much of each ingredient will be used. However, one of the most important aspects of homemade baby food is that there are no harmful additives and preservatives.
In order for grocery stores to be able to keep the baby food shelf stable for a long time, the companies who produce the baby food have to add preservatives. These preservatives can be harmful to baby’s health and disrupt their gut microbiome. In addition, many companies will also incorporate additives to either act as fillers and stretch out their ingredients or add a certain color to the food to make it more appealing to buyers. Let’s be honest with ourselves, babies do not need their food to be perfectly colored and “appealing” to be able to eat it. A baby only cares that the food tastes good.
Controlling what main ingredients go into your baby’s food is very important. If you’ve looked at baby foods on the store shelf, you may have noticed the ingredients state that there is turkey, chicken, beef, etc. Reading between the lines, you’ll realize the companies don’t state how the meat was raised or even how the vegetables were grown. You always want to aim for grassfed/pasture-raised meats as well as organically grown vegetables and fruits. Grassfed and pasture-raised meats provide so much more nutrition than industrial-raised meats, and the meat tends to be free from antibiotics and added hormones. Organically grown fruits and vegetables are free from glyphosate, which can disrupt your endocrine system, reduce your good gut bacteria, cause neurotoxicity and so much more. Truly, this is not something you want to be consuming yourself and you certainly don’t want your little baby consuming.
How To Make Baby Food - The Easy Way
The absolute easiest way to prepare homemade baby food is to puree up the food you and the rest of the family is already eating. Of course, this would require that the rest of the family is eating a healthy diet, which is a good idea all around. In addition, you can make extra food at each meal and use this to create the baby’s purees. So, let’s go over some real-life examples of how to put this into practice. Let’s say you are making a beef pot roast, rice and broccoli for dinner. You can take some of the roast, some broccoli and the juices from cooking the roast along with a little water and add this to a blender. Blend it up until it’s nice and smooth and then you can portion it out into containers and even freeze in small portions for later. We’ll get into baby food storage toward the end of this post. Another example would be if you are cooking a chicken stew with carrots. You can take some of the chicken, some carrots and some of the cooking liquid along with some water and blend it up the same way. This method applies to any combination of meat and veggies you can think of and has endless possibilities. As you rotate certain meals for your family, you’ll also be rotating different meats and vegetables for your baby which is great for meeting their nutrient requirements. This will also help with building their gut microbiome.
How To Make Baby Food - The Slightly Harder Way
Of course, another way to make your baby’s food is to prepare meals that are specifically for them and for making their purees. This requires a little more effort than the previous method, but if you use some more simple recipes, it’s truly not much harder than the previous method. Our family prefers to cook a lot of meals in the instant pot, and you can cook baby food the exact same way. One of our favorite things to do is throw some meat and a vegetable or two in the instant pot to cook down. It never takes us more than around 45 minutes from start to finish and is well worth it considering the benefits. We’ll share one of our favorite recipes for this down below.
Baby Food Storage
We never store baby purees in the fridge for longer than 3-4 days. Our preferred method is to freeze the food into little cubes that can be reheated later. See a picture of this below:
Our baby ends up going through the freezer food in 2 weeks or less but it would probably stay pretty fresh for a few months. This is beneficial if you want to prepare a large amount of food ahead of time and freeze it for baby to eat in the coming months. The link to the freezing trays we use is here.
We also really love the glass containers (pictured above) for storing in the refrigerator and taking on the go. I’ll share the link for those here. Not to get all crunchy momma on you, but it’s best to store baby’s food in glass containers (rather than plastic) due to the plastic containers leaching chemicals into the food and causing all sorts of health issues. We’ll let you do the research on that one yourselves. Also, the glass containers recommended above come with silicone lids, which is great. We also prefer to freeze in silicone because it is also free from harmful chemicals than can get into baby’s food.
A Nutritious Baby Food Recipe to Try - Chicken and Carrot Puree
In summary, making your baby’s food homemade is well worth the time and effort. Using quality ingredients benefits your baby’s health monumentally and will set them up for good health for the rest of their lives. To give you some encouragement, you will only have to make baby’s food for a short period of time before they are eating typical solid foods right along with you. Good luck and please reach out if you have any questions! Comment below to share with us and other mommas what your favorite baby food making techniques and recipes are.
Share This Post:
Copyright © 2024 Happily Homemaking – All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy