Baby-led weaning consists of offering wholesome food to babies instead of puree. It’s a great way to develop babies’ sensory skills as well as your little one holds the food in their own hands. Therefore, they discover all the textures, temperatures, smells of the food. It’s an entire food experience. More than just feeding them, baby-led weaning offers your baby the opportunity to explore their 5 senses.
Banana and weaning benefits
Banana is the best food to start a baby-led weaning experience for so many reasons. First, for mums, bananas are easy to peel and offer in many ways without even cooking them! That’s a great point because most baby recipes required cooking, mashing, and cooling time. And often, as a tired breastfeeding mum, you just want to offer simple, quick food to your baby.
Is banana a choking hazard food?
Fresh bananas are usually not a choking hazard for babies, but they often gag on them, especially if you cut or mash bananas with bigger-sized pieces. Gagging is a normal reflex in babies starting to eat solid food. It happens when the food sticks to the baby’s throat. When babies gag on food like small banana pieces, it brings them forward in their mouth so they can chew and then swallow the food in smaller volumes. However, don’t offer processed bananas to babies like dried banana chips. These are hard, sharp, and babies can choke on them.
How to introduce bananas to a baby for the first time?
To introduce bananas to babies, first choose slightly ripe bananas, not green ones, rather a yellow banana or with a few dark spots on the skin. In fact, ripe bananas are softer and always sweeter, so babies tend to love them even more. Then, you have many options to offer bananas to your little one. Below we listed many ways to offer bananas to small kids showing signs of readiness to introduce solids.
Banana Puree
This is perfect for babies at their early stage of eating because purees are super smooth. It is the first way to offer bananas to babies. Peel the ripe bananas, cut them into pieces, and place in a blender with just enough breast milk – about 2 tablespoons per medium banana – and blend to form a smooth liquid puree. You can also use this banana puree to flavor baby cereals.
Roughly mashed
When babies grow, sit properly on their chairs, you can introduce banana bites. Puree the ripe banana on a baby bowl keeping bits and pieces of soft fruits. You can provide a spoon to your baby or let him pincer grasp the mashed banana.
Handheld banana
This consists of offering the entire fruit peeled on one side to your baby. Babies can hold the banana from the unpeeled side and suck, chew pieces of this banana.
Banana Smoothie
Blend one banana and 1/3 cup of breast milk or milk of your choice until smooth. You can offer dairy-free milk alternatives like soy milk or soy baby formula, or almond milk.
Banana popsicle
As above, blend bananas and milk of choice until smooth but still thick and creamy. Transfer into any popsicle mold or ice cube tray and stick a wooden popsicle stick in the middle before freezing. These frozen banana popsicles are also great to relieve baby teething pain.
Baby-led weaning banana recipes
We created a range of easy baby-led weaning banana recipes that can be made in less than 30 minutes. All these baby banana recipes are easy to make ahead and freeze so that you can meal prep baby snacks and meals ahead of time. Some of them contain added sweeteners that you can skip or reduce depending on the age of your baby. Always pick a recipe that fits your baby’s readiness to eat coarser ingredients. For example, old-fashioned rolled oats in cookies can be a choking hazard in babies. It’s safer instead to use oat flour or quick oats that have a thinner texture.
Banana food combination
It’s also a great idea to offer bananas with some other food combinations. For example, you can serve bananas with nut butter. Cut small pieces of banana and spread a bit of peanut butter or almond butter on them. You can also use my recipe for banana strawberry peanut butter smoothie and skip the sweetener. Bananas are great with:
Strawberries Apple puree Nut butter – swap for seed butter if your baby has an allergic reaction to nuts. Cocoa powder – make a smoothie with. Dates – make a chocolate avocado date popsicle for summer. Carrots – to make baby carrot banana cookies. Spinach
Banana allergy
Banana is one of the less common allergic foods, with less than 1% of people allergic to bananas. However, if you want to test your baby’s reaction to bananas, offer only 1 preloaded spoon as a first stage. If your baby shows an allergic reaction to bananas, it can be seen with:
Skin rash Swelling on mouth and throat
Immediately consult a GP if your baby has an allergic reaction to any food, and stop offering the food immediately. Did you try some of the baby-led weaning banana recipes in this post? Share a comment or review below to connect with me. Your mum friend, Carine
