Baby food: make it yourself or buy jars?

Baby food: make it yourself or buy jars? 

Are you team ‘I have to make all the baby food myself’ or team ‘a jar is fine too’? Of course, we live in a country where both are good. There are pros and cons to both options. We compare them in this blog & tell you what choices we made ourselves.

Your baby grows up far too quickly—that cliché is certainly true. Before you know it, your mini is already 4 months old and can slowly start getting used to solid food. At that stage, it’s all about ‘tasting portions’, because milk is still the main source of nutrition. We started with banana, broccoli, and carrot—just a few bites and you’re done. They loved it and found it really interesting to have something on their tongue. When we started feeding Rafa, we were advised to regularly add a little peanut butter and small pieces of egg to the baby food. There is research showing that if you introduce babies to these ingredients early on, they are less likely to develop allergies (TIP from JIP, it can’t hurt).

After 6 months, you usually start with complementary feeding and replace one bottle with a baby food portion. A whole new world opens up, because with so many choices, do you make it yourself, buy jars, or order fresh frozen jars (NEW!).

What are the pros and/or cons of each option? Read on below.

Homemade baby food

Pros
- If you make everything yourself, you know exactly what ingredients your baby is getting.
- You can give your baby individual flavors, so you quickly find out what they like and what needs more practice.
- As your baby grows, you can decide how finely or coarsely to puree the food (and combine it with the Rapply method).
- Generally cheaper than jarred baby food

Cons
- It takes more time.
- You have to cook separately for your baby, as they often cannot eat everything you eat yet, or it contains too much salt or other spices.

Jarred baby food

Pros
- It’s quickly ready. Just heat it in the microwave or in a small pan with hot water and you’re done!
- Super convenient for on the go.
- The composition is just right for babies, as stated on the packaging. No ingredients that your baby cannot digest yet. No chance of ‘mistakes’.

Cons
- It often contains more calories than your baby needs.
- Vegetables/fruit are often mixed together, so your baby does not recognize the individual flavors.
- The taste is less intense due to sterilization.
- Choice is limited.

Fresh jarred baby food is the newcomer in the baby food world. It has now been on the market for a few years. I think you mainly know it from Eetspruit . Fresh and easy. It combines the benefits of both options, it is fresh and precisely balanced for your baby’s age. The only downside is that it is still quite expensive.

We both chose to make the baby food ourselves. Yes, this certainly takes time. But you develop your own method in the process. For example, I cooked once a week, usually steaming 4 types of vegetables and making different combinations with potato/pasta/rice and meat/fish. This was weighed out with a kitchen scale (check Google for the right amounts!) and put into an IKEA bag. Let it cool down and pop it in the freezer! Then you could simply defrost one portion every day for the evening. The fruit portion was pureed just like that, of course, using whatever fruit was in the fruit bowl. For this, I simply used a simple stick blender with a container from Braun that I also used for Thiago—a small investment, but I still get a lot of use out of it!

Femke did the exact same thing with Dex as I described above. Tido has been eating solid food for 2 months now—what a little foodie that is! She ‘treated’ herself to a baby food processor and is really sold on it. It takes very little time & you can make your own baby food portion fresh every day. You can cut the vegetables, steam them in the machine first, let them cool down, and then blend them. IDEAL, haha. The advantage, of course, is that you can blend every day and do not have to fill your freezer. The only downside we can think of is that it is quite expensive. No spon, but she is completely enthusiastic about the Philips Avent steam blender.

There are good things to say about all the options. And one great thing about living in the Netherlands is that all the options are good, because everything is properly tested. After all, we only want one thing: the very best for your child!

Love, Maaike