Chia seed jam is a homemade jam recipe made of healthy chia seeds and fruits. It’s a jam made without sugar or gelatin. It only uses fruits and healthy plant-based chia seeds as a gel to provide a similar sticky, gooey texture to the store-bought jam. It’s a great healthy breakfast jam or baby first food for vegan babies infants to introduce berries, fibers, and plant-based proteins from the chia seeds. Like my Baby Yogurt Melts, this recipe can be one of the first foods you give to your little ones!
Ingredients and Substitutions
It’s made with 2 simple healthy ingredients:
Berries – Feel free to use fresh or frozen fruits. Both work very well. The best choice listed in order of sweetness, from the sweeter to the most bitter, are blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries. Chia seeds or ground chia seeds – These super seeds contain lots of fiber, omega-3, plant-based proteins, and anti-oxidants. Once in contact with water or juicy fruits, they soak up the liquid and form a gel-like texture similar to jam. As a result, they are the perfect healthy ingredients to create a jam-like texture without adding sugar to kid food. You can also use ground chia seeds to avoid the lumpy texture of chia seeds in your jam.
You can add some other ingredients to your baby chia jam recipe to add an extra flavor to your jam like:
Lemon juice – perfect with blueberries but not recommended if you are making a raspberry chia jam recipe. In fact, raspberries or naturally bitter, so adding lemon turns the baby jam very sour. Sour is a great flavor to introduce to babies, but too many sour fruits can upset their gut. Vanilla extract or pure vanilla seeds – to add a hint of vanilla flavor. Sweetener – you can sweeten the jam with 1-2 tablespoons of maple syrup or stevia.
How To Make Baby Jam
This chia seed jam recipe is a simple 2-ingredient recipe perfect for people who love sugar-free jam.
Serving Suggestion
You can serve this raspberry chia seed jam recipe on its own as a healthy raw dessert or for breakfast on top of a slice of vegan gluten-free bread, vegan pancakes, or vegan crepes. It makes the best combo of flavor served with peanut butter or almond butter. Another option is to use a baby jam for vegan babies from 9 months.
Storage Instructions
This baby jam recipe can be stored for up to 4 days in the fridge in a sealed glass mason jar or airtight container. You can also freeze the baby jam in ice cube trays in single portions, but only if you used fresh fruits! You should never freeze a product that has been frozen before to avoid bacteria contamination. So if you used frozen berries for this recipe, the jam must be eaten within 4 days.
More Baby-Friendly Recipes
Below I listed some more healthy toddler recipes for you to try:
