We are sometimes asked how many times it is safe to reheat baby food.
The simple answer is once – and once only.
By ‘reheat’, we mean warming the food after it has initially been prepared.
In other words, you can take a piece of meat and some veggies, cook them and combine them to make a meal for your baby. You may then store this prepared meal in your fridge or freezer.
When you’re ready to use it you should heat it until it’s piping hot, allow it to cool to a safe temperature – then serve it.
If your baby doesn’t finish the meal, YOU SHOULD DISCARD IT.
It is NOT safe to put it back in the fridge and heat it again later.
Now, the best option to avoid waste would be to heat the food in smaller portions from the outset – you can always heat a little more if necessary.
And this form of portion control is, of course, yet another advantage of making your own baby food – heating small amounts of food is so much less wasteful than having to open a large jar when you only need a little food!
If you DO need to warm extra food during your baby’s meal, we recommend calling for someone else to do it for you so that you don’t need to leave your baby.
For some reason, our little ones would finish a bowl of food and look as if they wanted more… but if I got up to warm more food, then they’d refuse to eat it! Yet if I got hubby to do it, then smoothly carry on feeding from the new bowl, they’d eat it all!
Your little one may not be quite as contrary as ours… nevertheless, this is a tip worth bearing in mind!
So what’s the risk of reheating food twice?
Well – for one thing, the nutritive quality of food diminishes every time you heat it. But more crucially, the risk of foodborne illness INcreases. This risk is compounded by the fact that your leftover baby food will contain traces of your baby’s saliva from his spoon. Unfortunately, this introduces yet MORE bacteria into your little one’s food.
So to sum up…
Reheat your baby’s food just ONCE after cooking it, in small quantities to avoid waste… and you can be confident that his food will be not only delicious, but safe for him to eat, too!