Is Baby ready for Baby’s first foods? Are YOU ready for baby’s first foods? While you can’t beat the convenience of a pouch, I highly recommend making your own baby food when possible.
Making baby food is easy, the flavor is much more delicious, and you can create a fantastic variety of textures. Exposure to as many flavors and textures as possible creates adventurous eaters. Bonus that you might enjoy these subtle changes as much as Baby! Every recipe I share Husband and I eat ourselves.
One tip to save time and energy … make a large batch and store in the freezer until you’re ready to use it. Check-out this post for a recommendation on the perfect ice cube trays to freeze your homemade baby food.
Varying the cooking method can create dramatic nuances in the flavor and texture of an ingredient. To create variety for a single ingredient recipe, choose different cooking methods to expand your baby’s palate. Here are some ideas …
COOKING METHODS
Roast
Bake
Saute
Boil
Steam
Poach
And don’t forget … raw!
These images demonstrate the impact of different cooking methods on appearance and texture. In this example, I used sweet potato. I baked the sweet potato whole and cubed the roasted and boiled versions prior to cooking. In the images, the bowl shows the ingredient pureed with a bit of water; the cloud-like pile is the ingredient mashed with a fork; finally, the cubes represent the ingredient’s intact cooked texture, with the exception of baked, where the entire potato was baked and the resulting texture was soft and fibrous when removed from the skin with a fork.
Big and I both preferred the caramelized, rich flavor imparted by roasting. Little preferred the clean, simple flavor produced by boiling. With these three simple cooking techniques, you can create a ton of variety across single ingredient recipes for Baby’s first foods.
