10 Trader Joe's Foods to Buy for Baby-Led Weaning
Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post. Special thanks to dietetic intern Stephanie Congdon (Instagram: @nfnutrition) for her help and contributions to this post.
10 Trader Joe's Foods to Buy for Baby-Led Weaning
If you’re a fan of Trader Joe’s and you have a baby in your house, here are 10 easy foods that you can buy at TJ’s that also work for baby-led weaning.
This is not a “first 10 foods” or the only 10 foods you could purchase at Trader Joe’s, by any means! It is simply a list of 10 foods from TJ’s that you might NOT have thought your baby can eat.
Keep in mind that the greater the number of foods, flavors, tastes and textures that you can expose your baby to early and often - the easier it will be to raise an independent eater (and prevent picky eating!)
So here goes...10 Trader Joe’s foods you can buy and serve your baby safely with baby-led weaning:
1. FRESH BASIL
I sometimes go to Trader Joe’s just to get the basil. It’s big, it’s cheap, it’s amazing and fragrant.
And what does a baby do with fresh basil leaves? Well, definitely don’t serve the leaves to the baby! We leave raw leafy foods like spinach and kale and basil ‘til later. They can be a choking hazard and there is an easier way to use basil for babies.
You can use basil in an easy homemade pesto recipe that babies can eat. If you have a food processor - basil, olive oil, lemon juice and a little cheese or pepper to taste makes a great base for pesto.
You can use the pesto to top pasta (cooked pasta is an easy way to introduce the potentially allergenic food wheat to babies), but it’s also a nice dipper for dry breads and crackers. Dry bread and crackers can be a choking hazard for baby so always try to moisten them (with a basil pesto if you want!) to be on the safe side.
2. EZEKIEL BREAD
Bread is not your baby’s best friend. As mentioned above, dry bread and crackers can be a choking hazard, so you always want to make sure you’re moistening things up. I recommend topping bread with mashed banana or whole milk ricotta cheese or for older babies, thinned out nut butters work well too.
Another problem with bread is that it tends to be very salty. Ezekiel bread is a great option because it is a wholesome, actually tasty bread with very minimal sodium. There are varieties of Ezekiel bread that have 0mg sodium and are great for babies. Just don’t forget to moisten things up with a dipper or a topper.
3. TAHINI
Tahini is a paste made out of sesame seeds and an important ingredient in hummus. Sesame seed is not one of the Big 8 foods (the 8 foods that account for about 90% of food allergy)...but sesame allergy is on the rise and Food Allergy Research and Education (FARE at foodallergy.com) recommends adding sesame to the list of allergenic foods.
But feeding babies little tiny sesame seeds doesn’t make any sense. Babies don’t get their pincer grasp until about 8 months of age, and there’s an easier way to introduce sesame: with tahini.
I use tahini as a base in all sorts of homemade hummus dips that babies love. Commercial hummus is very high in sodium, which isn’t appropriate for babies. But make it at home with no salt tahini and you are in business!
4. SPAGHETTI SQUASH
All sorts of squash work well for baby-led weaning, provided they are thoroughly cooked and soft and served to baby in longer spear-shaped sizes that the baby can self-feed.
One squash that you might not use often but do want to check out for BLW is spaghetti squash. Again you can use any squash for BLW, but spaghetti squash is particularly fun for babies to play with and the unique texture is a new experience too.
I get my spaghetti squash at Trader Joe’s, split it down the middle, scoop the seeds out, lather it up with a ton of olive oil or avocado oil and pop each side face down in a pyrex dish in a 400 degree oven for about 40-50 minutes or until it shreds easily with a fork.
Adding the extra oil is a good way to get a little extra fat in your baby. Fruits and vegetables are fine, but babies also need fat to help their still developing brains. I look for the oils that are mostly unsaturated sources of fat like peanut oil, canola oil, avocado and olive oil.
5. LAMB
If your family eats meat, try to incorporate animal foods early on in the weaning process. This is to help provide iron, which your baby needs to be getting from foods at age 6 months and beyond.
Dark meats actually have more iron than lean meat does. So go for beef, veal, lamb if you can. Steer clear of chicken breast and turkey breast which not only have less iron (they still do have iron though….) but those lower fat cuts of meat are more dry and dry meats increase choking risk.
I love the lamb roast from Trader Joe’s. I pop it in a slow cooker with low sodium broth, or even a little water with seasoning (not salt) and a few hours later it’s ready to go. You want to have soft, shredded strips of meat like lamb that even babies without teeth can benefit from gnawing or chomping on.
They’re not digesting or even ingesting a ton of the meat at this point early on in weaning, but it’s a good habit to get into to prepare a variety of iron containing foods...like lamb!
6. EDAMAME
Edamame are boiled soybeans. Soy is one of the Big 8 allergenic foods (although tofu is an easier way to introduce soy to earlier eaters). Babies start to get their pincer grasp around 8 months of age, and when they can start scooping up smaller pieces of food - like edamame, it also means it’s safe for them to be eating this smaller-sized food.
See how this brand of edamame at Trader Joe’s has only 5mg sodium? That’s a great product for babies...just be on the lookout because there are some brands of shelled edamame that add sodium beforehand and you want to steer clear of those for the earlier eaters.
7. LOW SODIUM BROTH
Trader Joe’s has a great variety of low sodium broth options. You can get low sodium beef broth, low sodium chicken broth and low sodium vegetable broth there.
Low sodium broths are great for slow cooking or roasting those high iron meats that babies can eat at 6 months of age or older. You want to avoid tough pieces of meat for babies early on...so cooking your meat low and slow in a low sodium broth is a great way to tenderize and get soft strips babies can self-feed.
There are no hard and fast guidelines for sodium levels for babies in the US (the UK does have sodium guidelines). My general rule of thumb is to try to keep the sodium below 100 mg per serving when you’re selecting packaged foods babies will eat. Of course they always eat smaller portions than adults, so the amount they are getting is less. But if you can make most of the foods for baby-led weaning yourself at home and then occasionally rely on something packaged around 100 mg sodium per adult serving, you’re probably doing ok!
Notice how the Trader Joe’s organic chicken broth has 90 mg sodium per cup whereas the vegetable one has 140 mg per cup. It’s not a big deal of a difference - and no way is a baby drinking a whole CUP of broth...but it is a good idea to get in the habit of reading sodium on labels and choosing the lowest possible for your baby.
A little salt is ok but you don’t want baby to become accustomed to tasting the salt and not the flavor of the food. Overexposure to sodium early on can lead baby to have a preference for salty (less healthy) foods down the road.
8. SWEET POTATOES
Sweet potatoes are one of the easiest starter foods to prepare for baby-led weaning. (If you’re looking for info on other easy starter foods, grab my free download “10 EASY FINGER FOODS TO START BABY-LED WEANING”.”
Of course you can buy sweet potatoes at lots of stores, I just find that Trader Joe’s tends to have a more consistent stock (even outside of the fall months when they’re not available at many other stories). I also like that their sweet potatoes are uniform in size and so they tend to cook more evenly.
To prepare sweet potatoes for babies, turn your oven on to 400 degrees F, scrub the sweet potatoes and plop them on a baking sheet. Bake for about an hour, or until tender. Then let cool until ALMOST cool but not entirely and peel the skin off. (It’s much harder to remove the skin once the potato has entirely cooled). Then cut the cooled sweet potato into shapes about the size of your adult pinky finger (or a fat french fry) and serve to baby.
9. PLAIN YOGURT
One of the most confusing things about starting solids are the recommendations about babies having milk and dairy. It is true that babies should not have fluid cow’s milk in place of breastmilk and/or formula until baby has reached 1 year of age.
But it is not true that babies can’t have dairy foods like yogurt or some milk when it is used as an ingredient or elsewhere in the diet (...just not in lieu of breastmilk and/or formula). In fact, milk protein is one of those Big 8 allergenic foods - and there is some data that introducing milk protein early and often to baby may help prevent milk allergy down the road.
One of the easiest ways to introduce cow’s milk protein is by offering baby plain, whole milk yogurt. Plain because that means it does not contain added sugars (even seemingly healthy “fruit yogurts” are often chock full of added sugars). Whole milk yogurt is also best because of the higher fat content which is helpful for that still-developing baby brain. (Steer clear of reduced fat dairy products until after 2 years.)
But how do you do yogurt if you’re doing baby-led weaning? Well you can always let your baby eat with his hands. Yogurt is inherently messy (we only do yogurt for babies on bath day at my house!) ...but you can also incorporate spoons with BLW too.
To get your baby on board with self-feeding yogurt by spoon, all you have to do is pre-load a baby spoon with the yogurt, offer it handle-side first to baby, help guide spoon to mouth at first...soon enough your baby will pick it right up and be able to self-feed this thick puree texture.
The spoons that I like for baby-led weaning are the Tiny Spoons from ezpz. They were designed by a speech language pathologist and infant feeding expert and are perfect for helping independent eaters learn how to self-feed. You can get 10% off at ezpzfun.com with my code KATIE10.
10. SALMON
Salmon is a fatty fish and a perfect food for baby-led weaning. Yes of course you always want to do a spot check for bones, but salmon is so easy to roast and season and babies love trying out this soft texture and unique new flavor.
Fish is also one of the Big 8 allergenic foods, so it’s one of the foods you want to offer early and often. With all of these allergenic foods, you do want to wait a few meals or days in between introducing in order to observe for a potential reaction. With other low-risk foods (i.e. ALL of the foods that aren’t the Big 8 foods or sesame), it is perfectly safe to offer a new one of those foods every day. If your baby is going to have a reaction to a low risk food, it will occur within hours - not days - after ingestion. There’s no need to go slow with new foods, with the exception of the allergenic foods, you want to build a little time in between those.
In some of the photos inside of this post you’ll notice the overhead bowl pictures of the foods are numbered by days. These are foods from my 100 First Foods approach to baby-led weaning. If you’re on instagram, check out my page @babyledweanteam - and scroll ALL the way back in the feed for the 100 First Foods content. You can also see the highlights up top with additional videos and pictures all about how to safely prepare and offer baby these 100 first foods!
If you’re looking for more information about getting a safe start to solid foods, check out my FREE online workshop “BABY-LED WEANING FOR BEGINNERS: How to get your baby to try 100 foods before turning one without YOU having to spoon-feed purees or buy pouches!
Everyone on this free workshop gets a copy of my list of 100 FOODS TO FEED YOUR BABY...just for being there! Plus inside of the workshop I explain my 100 First Foods framework that lays out exactly how you can get your baby to try these 100 foods using baby-led weaning, and all before his or her first birthday.
Stick around to the end of the workshop too where I host a Q&A to answer all of your burning BLW questions. Click here to sign up for the free workshop today.
