Baby Food Ingredients – Homemade Baby Food vs Manufactured

Types of baby food

Manufactured baby foods come in two sorts: ‘wet’, pre-prepared meals, mainly in containers and cans; and dry foods within packs (these have to be combined with water or even milk). The meals are labelled or classified depending on exactly what age of infant they are targeted at. Within these types you can choose from the progressively popular natural ranges or even non-organic kinds. Then you’ve got a choice from the vast range of flavours and recipes — from ‘turkey dinner’ and ‘apple pie dessert’ to chicken korma and courgette risotto with blueberry.

Babies can begin consuming solid meals at close to four months. Prior to this age, their own fragile digestive systems are not fully developed enough to deal easily with anything besides milk or water. The majority of parents begin by giving their babies baby rice, that you simply buy in packets and mix along with boiled water or milk. Baby rice is very dull, so your baby gets accustomed to the texture of food before experiencing any real taste. Formula or breast milk should still be the primary source of nutrition. By the time your child is about 6 months old, so long as everything is mashed up or even puréed, his / her taste buds as well as stomach tend to be more or less prepared for the majority of the foods you consume.

Shop-bought or home-made baby food?

The big question confronted by the majority of parents once they start correct weaning is whether or not to go for store-purchased packets and jars of food, to make home-made baby meals, or to perform a bit of each. Manufactured baby foods possess clear benefits in terms of convenience. You don’t have to do any scraping, boiling or puréeing — you just pop open the jar and down it goes (with some infants, without any requirement for heating up either). If you feed straight from the jar, you don’t even need to do any cleaning-up.

For many mothers and fathers, on the other hand, this sort of convenience is not the be-all and end-all. Home-made meals also have obvious advantages, not least because you have total control over precisely what your baby consumes. You know where the food originates from and that it doesn’t include any ingredients you have no idea about.

You are able to alter the consistency of the meals and test out different preferences and blends to suit your infant’s progress (use either a special blender for baby meals or a portable blender; or else you can mash soft meals, such as plums, up with the fork). Home-made meals could be cheaper if you are using the same meals that the rest of the family is consuming, and can additionally help babies get used to the flavour of home-prepared food. Nor does home-made food have to be much less convenient — you are able to, for example, make batches of food to freeze in ice-cube trays and defrost small amounts when it’s needed.