We LOVE using pasta in our baby food recipes – it’s just so versatile and has a wonderful texture for babies who are just learning to chew, either with or without teeth!
If you are serving pasta to your little one as a finger food, then you can just leave the pieces whole and allow him to pick them up and bite or ‘smoosh’ them to his heart’s content. But if you wish to serve him pasta from a spoon, then the pieces will, of course, need to be more ‘baby sized’.
There are several options for making pasta dishes that are easy for your baby to cope with.
One is to buy pasta shapes (such as Alphabet Pasta) that are made specially for babies – although, surprise, surprise, these can often be more expensive than regular pasta.
Pastina – little pasta stars – are another good option and can do double duty in soups for the whole family.
You may also like to try using orzo, a type of pasta which resembles large grains of rice or barley. The availability of orzo is slightly more limited in the UK than in the US – in fact, the last time we mentioned orzo on our site we had two messages from the UK asking where you can buy it! At present, it tends to reside in the international or ethnic food aisle at most good supermarkets – failing that, you should be able to locate it at an Italian delicatessen.
If you’re in an area where none of these speciality products are available (and we often have trouble locating ‘unusual’ pasta shapes like these in our corner of the world!), then just go ahead and buy regular pasta.
You can easily chop it up for your baby after it’s been cooked, although we find that a little laborious!
OR – you can try the rather primitive (but quick) technique we used this week, which was to place our pasta shapes in a zip top bag then give them a pounding with a rolling pin until they were in small pieces (just don’t get carried away or you’ll end up with a bag of dust!).
This technique worked surprisingly well – the only caveat is to make sure that you use a fine mesh strainer to drain the pieces, or you will lose some of them through the holes – and to keep a close eye on the cooking time, as they may cook a little quicker than usual!
Use your baby sized pasta pieces in any recipe calling for pasta, or stir them into your baby’s soups, stews or veggie purees.
Tell us how your serve pasta to YOUR baby – and if you have any easy pasta baby food recipes, please share your ideas here!
Rich and Creamy Pasta Sauce With Zucchini | The Homemade Baby Food Recipes Blog
Friday 28th of August 2009
[...] days ago we wrote about How To Baby Size Your Pasta - that is, make regular pasta shapes small enough for your baby to [...]