Baby weaning: The importance of savoury and introducing texture

Most baby’s love just about every kind of fruit. This is because babies are literally born with a “sweet tooth” which is why young babies often turn their button noses up at vegetables the first few times.

This is always a bit of a challenge to parents, but it is important to teach your baby that healthy, savoury foods are delicious!

Bumbles™ encourages mom to get baby accustomed to savoury tastes, because at seven months or so, most babies naturally start to become more opinionated about what they eat and introducing new flavours can be more of a challenge.

What happens between seven and nine months?

• Your baby will start to show off their personality
• He will be able to make decisions on likes and dislikes
• She will develop advanced motor skills
• Your baby will be able to co-ordinate hands and feet
• Vocally their cooing and babbling is a way of exercising and learning to speak our language
• Chewing and swallowing food is important for the development of key muscles in the mouth

With all this development and co-ordination, as well as the reduced milk feeds, it means your baby needs extra energy and nutrients, including calcium, iron and fats to grow.

Your baby should be eating three meals a day and ready to enjoy a wide variety of tastes.

Introducing new foods

It can take up to 15 attempts for a baby to accept a new taste, so moms, hang in there, if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again!

Let me explain a little more –  in our weaning workshops we ask our moms to imagine someone offering them something to eat for the first time, something they have never seen before – what would they do? They would immediately reject it until they had used their senses (smell, see, touch and taste) to explore it. Your little baby is no different and the more they explore, the better they will be at eating new foods.

As a beginner, once you have introduced a wide range of single ingredient purées, we advise to start combining foods, it’s also a sneaky way to bring in savoury, especially if your baby prefers the sweeter foods.

It’s worth the effort. Studies have shown that babies with varied diets grow up to eat more healthily as adults, too. So you’re literally giving your baby a gift that will last a lifetime.

Introducing More Texture

We often hear moms saying that their baby can’t eat meat because they don’t have any teeth. Ask any breastfeeding mother how sharp those little gums are (we rest our case).

Babies are actually very good at chewing, but like everything else, they still need to be taught how to chew by adding textures to their food. As moms, we need to be patient and encourage it as texture change is something that must be done sooner rather than later.

If you are continuing with the conventional feeding route of purée, then we recommend the following:-

• Thickening purées by adding lumps
• Tiny pasta shapes, rice or couscous are excellent
• Mash a portion of your baby’s food and add it to the purée, gradually increasing the ration of mashed to puréed food
• Finely chopping a few of the vegetables so that the puréed meal contains tiny lumps, but keep these soft for a while so their little gums can squash them when they try to chew.
• Allow your baby to experiment feeding himself by handing baby the spoon or even better, let them get messy!

BLW (Baby Led Weaning)

We love it for babies to self-feed. We believe, and so do many other doctors and specialists around the world, that it is actually a better way for your baby to eat. It can be very daunting for Moms to let their baby self-feed, not only because of the fear of choking but also because of the mess.

We do understand, but trust us, it is short lived and before you know it your baby will no longer gag and will chomp away at any food you put in front of them.

For the confident BLW Moms, it is important to introduce a little meat, fish, dairy and eggs into their diet. Try offering it as follows:

• Fish is easy to flake with a fork
• Meat still may need blending but it is perfect to mix into mashed veggies
• Cut up small pieces of fruit and steamed veggies or you can even grate it onto their feeding tray (don’t bother with a bowl – it just gets thrown on the floor anyway)
• Cheese sticks are very good for chewing on
• Experiment with pulses and grains
• Lentils
• Whole boiled quinoa grains
• Brown Rice

For more information and guidance on how to introduce solids with confidence to your little one, please feel free to email us or speak to one of our Cookery Club Instructors.

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Bumbles Cookery Club

The Bumbles™ Cookery Club offers detailed workshops for each vital stage of the weaning process, as well a support and social group for moms to enjoy.

Our goal is to guide and assist moms, and dads, through the different weaning stages and to understand and learn the importance of each stage, when to introduce each food group and how to create delicious, nutritionally balanced meals not only for your little one but for the whole family.

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