Bananas are one of the easiest foods to prepare for your baby and a food they often love the most. It is one of the first foods they can eat as well! Your baby should be at least 4 months old according to Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron, and it is a great place for parents to get started if they are thinking of making their own baby food.
Preparing and Storing the Bananas for your baby
You really have three options, depending on the age of your baby and the effort you want to put into it. The first option is the best for a younger baby and the easiest to prepare. The last option is the best for an older baby and the most time consuming, but it is a great way to prepare a baby for eating table foods. They will turn brown in methods 1, 2, or 3 but it does not change the nutritional value. Some people say they turn a little slimy when frozen but I didn’t really notice that happening. They do separate a little when thawed but my daughter never had a problem with them.
Smooth Consistency Bananas
Peel the banana. Put the banana in a food processor. Blend until smooth. This gets the consistency of baby food. No added water is needed. Put in ice cube trays and freeze. They take a decent amount of time to freeze due to the thinness. After frozen, put in freezer bags and label! Yes, it is that easy!
Mashed Consistency Bananas
Peel the banana and mash it. It doesn’t get as thin as with the food processor and so you are starting to introduce thicker foods. Put it into the ice cube trays the same as the puree and then into the freezer bags when frozen. You can start with this method first if you wish, as long as your child is old enough when they eat their first food (at least 6 months).
** If you just want to get a banana ready for your child one day at a time, this is a great method to use!
Cut-up Bananas
Peel the banana. Cut it into small cubes, about a centimeter cubed. It can be really easy to cut it in half length-wise, then those in half, and then slice it across. You can of course do it however you want. You can still put it in the ice cube trays and it freezes just fine.
** If you have a child eating finger foods, this is a great method on a day by day basis but it gets very soft in the freezer and it is no longer able to be a finger food.
Save Money
For each pound of unpeeled bananas you can get about 10 food cubes. My organic bananas usually cost $0.59 a pound, so that comes out to about $0.06 a cube! If you buy non-organic bananas, you can often get them as cheap as $0.29 a pound, making each cube $0.03. That is a large savings compared to the $0.40 you would pay per cube in a jar of Earth’s Best Organic Bananas. That’s a savings of $0.34 for every cube you feed your child! With the bananas we’ve fed our daughter we estimate the savings to be between $30 and $40 over the course of 6 months.
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