How to prepare baby food at home
Preparing baby food at home is not complicated and does not take long. All you need is steaming tools and a homogenizer or blender. It is not necessary to prepare baby foods every day because they can be frozen . With a little organization it is therefore possible to feed your children, even the smallest ones, by cooking at home.
The simplest to make is the fruit homogenate . Simply blend a seasonal fruit or a mix of seasonal fruit, without adding sugar or anything else. We must also remember to put one fruit at a time into the feeding of the youngest and to buy only fruit from organic farming . Usually, we start with apples, which can also be simply grated, as our grandmothers used to do.
Vegetable, meat and fish homogenized foods require a little more time but are still very simple to make. Just prepare some vegetable broth, steam the meat or fish and then mix everything according to one of these simple, natural baby food recipes . The quantity of ingredients varies according to age. Once the homogenate has been prepared, add it to the pastina, to the rice or to a jelly based on cream (rice, tapioca, mixed cereals ...).
For the very first baby foods, many pediatricians advise not to do on their own and to start with a few tablespoons of freeze - dried pront i, which are more digestible.
Buy baby food: choice guide
If you can't make baby food at home and need to buy it, you need to read the list of ingredients carefully: not all baby foods are the same.
Here are some simple rules:
- Less is better : the shorter the list of ingredients the better;
- Meat and fish homogenates should be chosen without salt ;
- Always check the percentage of the main food ; if, for example, you want to buy the chicken homogenate check how much chicken there is and how much is there for the rest; check the quality of everything else as well;
- Remember that, according to European legislation, on the label the ingredients are ordered according to the quantity, therefore the first ingredient is the one present in greater quantity, of the second there is a slightly lower percentage and so on ...
- Compare the labels of various baby food brands; it will be discovered that some brands make very high quality products for all types of homogenized products and that others, on the other hand, produce some very valid homogenized products and others less; the higher price is not always an indicator of higher quality; often, however, when it comes to baby food, the most expensive products are also the best;
- Attention to the types of added fats contained in baby food;
- Attention to all additives .
