Aldi: 10 BLW Foods to Buy from Aldi

Katie Ferraro (0s):

Before we get started I have a quick baby Ezra update. So, I've been following my own 100 First Foods daily meal plan. I'm making five new foods a week for my friend Carissa's baby Ezra. So we're on week six now and Ezra is moving into eating foods 26 to 30. So I can't believe it. We're more than a quarter of the way done. He's very slowly starting to be more interested in the foods. I'm beginning to get longer videos back from his mom as he's actually starting to eat, which is exciting. And hey, if your baby is not really taking to solid foods yet by six weeks after you started, please do not stress. It generally takes most babies anywhere between eight to 12 weeks to really get the hang of starting solid foods. But here are the five new foods that Ezra is having this week.

Katie Ferraro (41s):

We're following my five step feeding framework. So we introduce one new food each day for five days each week. And each of those new foods comes from one of the five feeding categories. So on Monday we do a new fruit. We're having pineapple, I mean these really cool little pineapple mini muffin loaves with no sugar and no salt. And you cut 'em into little pieces. The baby can pick them up and eat them. Tuesday we're doing a new vegetable, it's cauliflower. One of my favorite recipes in our 100 First Foods daily meal plan is our curry cauliflower recipe. Wednesday we're doing a starchy food, so it's a kind of random whole grain called teff, but you make these really easy little teff burgers that turn into finger foods the baby can feed themselves. So good source of carbohydrate.

Katie Ferraro (1m 21s):

On Thursday we do a new protein food. We did ribs this week, which if you've never made a rack of ribs, we have the easiest way to do it. It makes this like fall off the bone meat that babies absolutely love. And then on Friday we do a new allergenic food that's tree nut. I'm a little bit nervous because he did have an allergic reaction to peanut, so they're kind of waiting to see if he's allergic to peanut. So that will kind of determine how we do tree nut. But if you want to follow that same 100 First Foods daily meal plan that we're doing, it's all part of my Baby-Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro program. I have the exact sequence of foods to feed as well as my 100 First Foods content library. So you can learn how to prepare all of the foods on the 100 First Foods list. 'cause I want your baby to eat 100 Foods before turning one.

Katie Ferraro (2m 3s):

You can follow that exact meal plan and try all these new foods and recipes too when you sign up at babyledweaning.co/program. Again, that's babyledweaning.co/program, and I hope to see you there.

Katie Ferraro (3m 12s):

And I was a little bummed that I couldn't find the short grain rice at Aldi to make that risotto, like they had plenty of like longer grain rice. But that's okay. I mean that's what you get. They're not always gonna have everything all the time and that's kind of why the prices are really affordable. In the meantime, as I was perusing the frozen foods aisle, I saw a frozen duck, which I know duck is coming up in a couple of weeks in our 100 First Foods daily meal plan. So at $3.29 a pound, I was like, I'm definitely buying this duck. So it was pretty good deal at Aldi. Hey there, I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietitian, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby-led weaning. Here on the Baby-Led Weaning Made Easy podcast, I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leaving you with a confidence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby-led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (4m 5s):

Hello, this episode is for the Aldi fans. I have got 10 baby-led weaning foods that you can get your baby from Aldi if you are an Aldi fan. And I have to be honest, I had never stepped foot in an Aldi until like 2021. I had heard about Aldi, I had read about Aldi, but we didn't have one in my town. So I live outside of San Diego. And I know from just working in nutrition for over 20 years and doing a lot of media where Aldi was always present I feel like. People were talking about it and people were raving about it. Like they were passionate, like Trader Joe's passionate and there's a lot of similarities. They were gonna talk about the relationship between Aldi and Trader Joe's today as well. But when we had a German au pair living with us and she was like, I remember her being like, oh my gosh, there's an Aldi coming.

Katie Ferraro (4m 49s):

And it was like a half an hour away at that point. And her and her other German au pair friend, they like drove to the Aldi. And I was like, what is the big deal with Aldi? I, I thought it was like a Midwest grocery store in the United States- totally wrong. In 1961, the Albrecht family founded the world's first discount grocery store in Germany. And then it wasn't until 1976 when the first Aldi opened in the United States in Iowa. So Aldi has a fan base for sure. They state that their values are high quality food, timely customer service, everyday low prices, smaller store layout for quick and easy shopping. And they have everyday items displayed in their original shipping boxes, which saves on restocking shelves.

Katie Ferraro (5m 29s):

I like kind of the no frill simplicity. I gotta be honest, I do get frustrated by Aldi 'cause it's certainly not one-stop shopping for me. But at this point in my life and career, I've realized I'm gonna have to go to multiple stores for the stuff I need and I'm kind of okay with it. As far as the connection between Aldi and Trader Joe's goes, Joe Coulombe who founded Trader Joe's actually ended up selling his business to one of the Albrecht brothers in 1979. So he actually went on to continue to be the CEO for a long time. Trader Joe's operated independently, but you can kind of see some of the similarities if you shop at both stores. They're certainly different. I think they appeal to different clientele, but I feel like people who love Aldi also love Trader Joe's. You're allowed to like two grocery stores.

Katie Ferraro (6m 9s):

If you love- I like grocery store history- two of the best books that I've read recently, the Secret Life of Groceries, it's called The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket. I thought it was fascinating. And there's, it's by an author named Benjamin Lorr. It's really well-researched like he went on shrimp boats in Thailand to kinda explain to you why, why shrimp has gotten so much cheaper when shrimp used to be so expensive. There's a whole Whole Foods subline, there's a Whole Foods subplot. There's also a Trader Joe's, kind of summary of the Trader Joe's story in there as well. And the other book that I feel like the Secret Life of Groceries did borrow kind of heavily from Joe Coulombe's own book called Becoming Trader Joe: How I did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys.

Katie Ferraro (6m 51s):

That was also an awesome book. So I recommend both of those. There is no baby-led weaning book club, but if there were, those two would be on it. So why do you care about Aldi? Well, like all grocery stores, there's a bunch of food in there that your babies can eat. So I went to Aldi to find 10 baby-led weaning foods that work at Aldi. But it's kind of hard because you know like what they have at Aldi today, they may not have tomorrow. So I was talking to one of the three employees in the store, like that's their jam. It's kind of, it's like Ikea, right? Like you wanna know why this stuff is cheap, 'cause there's nobody there to help you if you need any help 'cause there's no actual employees in the store or they keep it really minimal. Like that's part of how they keep the costs down is that there's only, at the time that I was there, it was a Saturday evening after long day of soccer, my suburban soccer mom lifestyle.

Katie Ferraro (7m 32s):

And I was going into Aldi and it was pretty packed and there were still only three people there and then, but the checker was kind of chatty 'cause you bag your own groceries there, which I secretly love.

1 (7m 40s):

At first I'm like, oh dude, I have to do the work. But I really am particular about how I want my groceries bagged. And I like being in charge of it. So I like that they check you out quickly and then you go over to the side counter and you pack all your own groceries at Aldi. So I think that's a cool feature. And she's like, yeah, it helps save a lot of money. And if they do things a little differently, like when you go to get a cart, you have to put a quarter in, you get the quarter back when you return the cart. But it encourages people and it must work if they're still doing it, to return their carts to get their quarter back and then they don't have to go and send their employees walking all around the parking lot to put the carts back that you were too lazy to do. But you would for whatever reason, do it for a quarter. And guess what? I definitely put the cart back for a quarter. So what did I buy at Aldi for baby-led weaning? So at the time of this recording, I am making five foods a week as part of my 100 First Foods program for a friend's baby.

Katie Ferraro (8m 26s):

The friend lives in my town and the baby's name is Ezra. And so he's following our 100 First Foods daily meal plan and I'm literally working my way through my own meal plan. And s we were on week five of baby-led weaning. So I was, well I was shopping for week five, so it was the weekend before week five started. I usually buy or order groceries on Saturday, then I prep everything for the next week for the baby on Sunday. So that on Monday I can start with one new fruit on Monday, a new vegetable on Tuesday, a starchy food on Wednesday, a protein food on Thursday and an allergenic food on Friday. And then I don't have to cook anything during the week for the baby. And then I use kind of the outline for what the baby is eating that week. It's literally the meal planning for what my family is eating.

Katie Ferraro (9m 8s):

So in week five of the 100 First Foods daily meal plan, we're doing mango as the new fruit, tomato as the new vegetable. Yeah, I know tomato is technically a fruit, but for all intents and purchases in this program, it's a vegetable. On Wednesday for the new starchy food, we're doing rice. So I was looking for a short grain rice to make our risotto recipe. And then the protein is ground meat so any sort of ground meat works. And then the new allergenic food is gonna be a fatty fish.

Katie Ferraro (10m 46s):

So I was looking for salmon. So for mango, they did have mango. Now it wasn't mango on the pit, it was the pre-cut mango that's already sliced and they did all the hard work for you. I absolutely love that. I think it's a convenience food worth paying for because I don't know if it's just me, but like I really struggle with getting the maximum amount of fruit off of the mango pit. So it is a convenience food that I like. However, whenever you're buying that pre-cut mango, like it is never soft enough to offer to your baby raw. So they had it, which was great. It was like three bucks for a little container, which I usually get at a Costco where it's my kid's like, can we get mango? I'm like no, because it's $10 for a clamshell. So it was probably about, I would say close to half the price for a comparable amount of mango, which is pretty good. And I bought a lot of it 'cause it makes some for the baby and some for my family.

Katie Ferraro (11m 29s):

But I ended up poaching that mango. So, if the fruit is not soft enough to offer it to your baby, you can cook it in a little bit of water but cut it into pieces about the size of your adult pinky finger. We have this chili spiced mango recipe and this mango is gonna work out perfectly. So I stoked about that. The next food that I was looking for was tomato. Now they had some nice beef steak tomatoes. I don't do cherry tomatoes for early eaters. The baby's only in week five. So just phase one still doesn't have a pincer grasp, not comfortable with smaller pieces of food yet. If you do do cherry tomatoes, you cut them into quarters up until babies are one. But I do longer pieces of beef steak tomato, which I got some of those. But we also have a no salt marinara sauce recipe in week five of the 100 First Foods daily meal plan. And in week four at the end we do pasta as the way to introduce wheat.

Katie Ferraro (12m 11s):

So I knew that this baby had already had pasta, had already had wheat, so I wanna make the low sodium tomato sauce as a way they could introduce tomato if they wanted to. They can practice drinking that out of an open cup. So I did find some great crushed tomatoes that had no added salt in a can that I'm gonna use for day two of this week, which is the marinara sauce. Now the third thing that I was looking for was a short grain rice. Super bummed that they did not have short grain rice at Aldi. They had jasmine rice, they had basmati rice, they had a long grain brown rice but no short grain rice. And that's fine, you can definitely make that for your baby and serve it to your baby if you want to. But I already had tons of long grain rice at home. The short grain rice is what we use. I was looking for like arborio or calrose or sushi rice in order to make this risotto recipe that is in the program.

Katie Ferraro (12m 56s):

So I didn't find the rice I struck out there. So moving on to the fourth food that I was looking for was a ground meat product. They had ground beef, they had lots of different varieties. So we tend to steer away from like the extra lean. I want actually some fattier. So like I normally would not buy 80/20 ground beef, meaning that it's 20% fat. But when I'm making it for a baby, I want as much fat as possible. 'cause when we make these salisbury steaks in week five of baby-led weaning, it's like this super easy, easy recipe. It's actually a variation of my own grandmother's salisbury steak recipe. So I modified it for baby-led weaning and it has a no salt gravy with it. And so I want a fatty, fatty, fatty, fatty piece of meat so that when it cooks that fat melts and it lubricates the protein strands and makes it easier for the baby to swallow.

Katie Ferraro (13m 37s):

So I did find ground beef at Aldi. The allergenic food that we're trying this week on week five is fatty fish. So I'm always going for salmon. They did some beautiful salmon there, which is some fresh salmon. I did see some canned salmon but it did have added salt in it. So I didn't buy that. But I got a nice big piece of salmon again for much cheaper than I get. I usually get my salmon at Costco and it was much cheaper than that. So definitely, I mean I think 80% of the foods that I needed this week I could find at Aldi. That was great. I had to go across the street to a different grocery store to get the short grain rice but not a big deal. The thing that I kind of subbed in place because I couldn't find the rice as I was perusing the frozen aisle, I did see a frozen duck and duck is coming up in a week or two and most grocery stores have frozen duck. If you're not inclined to look for it, you might not know that.

Katie Ferraro (14m 18s):

But duck is a great protein source, a nice fatty piece of meat that babies can safely eat. So I bought my frozen duck just to be ready. I don't have like tons of extra freezer space. So I don't usually buy a lot of extra food 'cause we already go through so much food. And then I'm cooking food for babies but I got the duck at $3.29 a pound, which I thought was pretty awesome. So I stoked on that. So those were the five foods that I ended up picking up that I'm using for baby Ezra as part of the 100 First Foods daily meal plan: mango, crushed tomato, frozen duck, ground beef, and salmon. Now I said this podcast episode title was 10 foods from Aldi. So the way I do these grocery store episodes is I like to go down with five foods that you can use from my 100 First Foods list. So mango, tomato, duck, ground meat, and fatty fish. We got those outta the way.

Katie Ferraro (14m 58s):

And then I kind of wanna share just five other random things that I saw that are either additional ingredients or things that help with baby led weaning. And I found like way more than five. I take pictures of all of them. So I just had to like go through on my phone before I came back and record it. I'm like wow, I did find a lot of stuff that would work there. A couple things that are not on the list. Seaweed snacks. You guys know babies don't need snacks, but parents are always like, if I have to be on an airplane or if we have, if I have to do snacks for my older baby 'cause we're you know off our schedule. What do you recommend? And I really any snack that is less than 100 milligrams of sodium can work for your baby. I don't do the seaweed snacks for earlier eaters 'cause they are a little bit crunchy and they can be hard to swallow. But for older babies and toddlers for sure, I love seaweed snacks. And I found ones that had no added salt and then I tried to pawn 'em off of my kids in their lunchbox and they used to love the heck outta seaweed snacks when they were babies and they were like, don't feed us seaweed, it's dunk, I don't like it.

Katie Ferraro (15m 43s):

And one kid actually liked it. And so anyway we had tried seaweed snacks and you could use them for older babies. If you do do snacks once your baby is confident, then you're confident that they can try some of those little bit trickier textures. I also saw low sodium crackers, which parents are always like, Katie, what? What brand of cracker do you use? I'm like dude, any cracker that has less than a hundred milligrams of sodium is gonna work for baby-led weaning. I do not do crackers in phase one 'cause a crunchy, crispy or hard food like a cracker can be a choking hazard for a baby. But once your baby gets a lot of foods under their belt and they're jamming with different textures, I just look for crackers that have less than 100 milligrams of salt. And there was, there's like, I don't wanna say it's off brand, but it's like different brands that I don't recognize at Aldi that I'm looking at all the nutrition facts panels. Just, gosh, there are some crackers here that are kinda like tasting crackers or like, you know the ones like cleansing your palate if you're into wine, they never have any salt in them and they do work great for baby-led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (16m 31s):

I wouldn't use 'em for baby Ezra yet. Not super confident. But for an older baby, if you put a dipper or a topper or ricotta on it, something to soften it up, we would definitely do those crackers. I also found peach slices in 100% juice in the canned food aisle. So, we don't want any canned foods in syrup, either light syrup or heavy syrup 'cause that's added sugar, but peaches, which they're not in season, sliced paches in their own juice or in water is great. And sometimes parents are like, wait, I thought you said no juice for babies. Well and a little bit of juice. Babies definitely don't need juice. And the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no juice for babies under age one. But if they're packed in fruit juice, that's naturally occurring. Fruit juice, you could rinse it off if you care, but the peach is sweet as it is as long as it's not added sugar from the syrup. I liked that they had that option.

Katie Ferraro (17m 11s):

It's a nice easy size to kind of cut down a little bit so the baby can pick it up and feed it to themselves.

Katie Ferraro (18m 27s):

So that was the eighth food. The ninth food that I found at Aldi was almond flour. So sometimes you can find almond meal, which is like a little bit coarser. I like almond flour 'cause it's a little bit more fine, but really you could use either one. It's a great way to introduce your baby to the potentially allergenic food tree nut. So I've already done peanut with Ezra, but I do know in my program that tree nut is coming up soon. So I got some almond flour for the future. That's one that's on the list. Peaches are on the list too, but I just added them to the cart just because they were there and they were really cheap. An almond flour can be expensive sometimes and sometimes almond flour products are expensive. And I actually use almond flour in a lot of like my breakfast breads and stuff for my older kids because it is higher protein, it is higher in fiber, it helps them feel fuller for longer compared to all purpose refined white flour.

Katie Ferraro (19m 8s):

So I kind of will cut like in a baking recipe half of the amount of flour. I'll replace it with almond flour when I can and when it's not super expensive. So I was stoked to find almond flour at Aldi 'cause it can be pretty expensive at a traditional grocery store. And then the last thing that I picked up was some milled flaxseed. So usually when you see flaxseed like you have to grind flaxseed in order to make it the finer powder and also release some of the nutrition so that the babies can absorb it. So I don't love like just plain flaxseed, but whenever there's ground flaxseed, and I definitely will get that. What I end up using it for is for babies that have an allergy to egg. You can make an egg substitute using flaxseed or you can do this using chia seed. And I did a whole podcast episode on flaxseed versus chia seed. I'll link to that in the show notes. But for babies that have egg allergy, we do this egg replacement where you take one tablespoon of flaxseed or ground flaxseed works even better.

Katie Ferraro (19m 54s):

And then you mix it with three tablespoons of water. You start up with a fork, you let it sit for like 10 minutes, it kind of gelatinizes. And then that is the equivalent of one egg. So if you're making like fritters or pancakes or baked goods, you can use that in there. It doesn't work awesome with baked goods, but it works really, really well with fritters. And another baby that I'm working with simultaneously does have an egg allergy, so I wanted to just have some more of that milled flaxseed on hand. So there are the 10 foods that I bought from Aldi: mango, crushed tomato, duck, ground beef, salmon, seaweed, snacks, low sodium crackers, peaches packed in 100% juice in a can, and then almond flour and milled flaxseed. So I will link to the other episodes that I did all about the different grocery stores 'cause there's a lot of them at this point. I think this is the last one in this series.

Katie Ferraro (20m 35s):

The series has taken me, I don't know, maybe a year to get through. We did a big batch of them last year and then those podcast episodes did really, really well with downloads. So, we decided to do another batch of them. If there's a grocery store that I missed that I can go to on your behalf and find things that you know your baby can eat for baby-led weaning, please let me know. I'd love to do more of these and take a little pause for them right now. Also, because groceries are so expensive, I'm like, this series is getting very expensive. But I loved Aldi because it definitely was affordable. So I'll link to those other ones so you can check those out. If you guys wanna get a copy of that 100 First Foods lists that when you go to the store you're like, these are the foods that I need, that's at my free workshop: Baby-Led Weaning for BEGINNERS. That's where you get the 100 First Foods list. If you want to know how to make all the foods on the 100 First Foods list safe for your baby to eat, that's inside of my program Baby-Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro.

Katie Ferraro (21m 23s):

That's where the 100 First Foods daily meal plan is. That's where the 100 First Foods content library is. That shows you how to make all these foods. If you go to babyledweaning.co, you can find links to both of those. Thank you so much for listening and happy shopping if you guys are gonna the grocery store. Everything for this episode will be on the show notes, which you can find at BLWpodcast.com/373. And thank you to our partners at AirWave Media. If you guys like podcasts that feature food and science and using your brain, check out some of the podcasts from AirWave.We're online at BLWpodcast.com. I'll check you next time. Thanks for listening.

Katie Ferraro (22m 3s):

Bye. If you're interested in doing baby-led weaning, but you're not exactly sure, like what does that mean? What does it look like? Where do I start? My online program called Baby-Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro has everything you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods and get them to eat over 100 foods before they turn one. Whether you're terrified of choking or maybe you've started but you feel like you're feeding your baby the same foods over and over 'cause you don't know what to feed next, or you're looking for guidance on how to prepare foods safely for your baby's age and stage, my program has exactly what you need. There's five hours of concise self-paced video training. You can knock this thing out during nap time this week. You also get access to my 100 First Foods content library so you can see and learn exactly how to prep all of the 100 foods as well as my original 100 days meal plan.

Katie Ferraro (22m 47s):

I've been refining this program for the last seven years. Just today, a mom wrote to me and told me that the 100 days meal plan has been a "game changer" for her busy lifestyle. When you join the program, you also get access to over 100 phase two combination food recipes. So you're gonna try out the trickier textures, push your baby's palate. And what's cool about these recipes is your whole family will enjoy them. So everything you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods is inside of the program. It's created by me, a registered dietitian who specializes in infant feeding. If you're tired of hunting and pecking around the internet trying to piece this stuff together on your own, I put it all in one convenient place for you. I invite you to check out the Baby-Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro program that's at babyledweaning.co.

Katie Ferraro (23m 27s):

Again, that website is babyledweaning.co and click on program to learn more.