Chicken: How to Make Chicken Safe for Baby-Led Weaning

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It even makes a great gift. And listeners of this show can get 20% off any AquaTru purifier when you go to aquatru.com. That's A-Q-U-A-T-R u.com and enter the code weaning at checkout. That's 20% off any AquaTru water purifier when you go to aquatru.com. And use the promo code weaning W-E-A-N-I-N-G at checkout@aquatrutru.com. If you're new to this whole world of baby led weaning and starting solid foods, you might still be on the fence as to whether this approach is going to work for you. And if that's the case, I want to send you my free feeding guide called Will Baby led weaning Work for My Baby.

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This is a guide that contains a decision train map that you can work your way through to determine if this is the right approach for you guys. And then when it's time to start, grab your copy of Will Baby Led Weaning Work for my baby on my website, head baby led weaning dot co slash resources. And hands down, my most favorite easy, like no-brainer way to make chicken for baby lead weenie is to just make a whole chicken. If you're like, Ugh, I don't wanna make a whole chicken, you guys, if you have an instant pot and a whole chicken and a cup of water, you can make this recipe. It's so easy, it's ready in no time. It makes the meat so nice and soft and flavorful and you can give those dark the fattier cuts of meat that we were talking about. The safe ones. We don't do the chicken breasts for babies, right?

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The legs, the wings, the thighs. It makes those nice soft shreddable strips of meat that are safe for your baby to eat. Hey there, I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietician, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby Led Weaning here on the baby Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro podcast. I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, giving you the confidence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to Solid Foods using baby Led Weaning. When your baby is just starting out with Solid Foods, it's pretty easy to come up with fruits and vegetables that you can easily make soft and offer his finger foods for that baby to pick up and feed themselves.

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But I know in the back of your head you're also like, well, fruits and vegetables, they don't contain any iron, they don't have any zinc, there's not any protein in those foods. My baby's not getting the experience of different textures that I know is important for them to become an independent eater. And maybe you are inadvertently or maybe totally on purpose skipping foods like meat. Okay? If your family eats animal foods, then it's a good idea to offer your baby meat foods like chicken and pork. If your family eats that beef lamb, there's lots of different animal proteins that you can make safe for your baby to eat. And in today's episode, I wanna focus on chicken. 'cause even for families that are like, oh, we don't eat a lot of meat, if you do eat meat, you probably eat chicken.

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And there are certainly some better. And then less than safe ways to offer your baby chicken. So that's the topic for today's episode. And I like to start out each of these mini training episodes with a baby Led Weaning tip of the day. And today's tip is, I don't care how much you love chicken breast or how great of a chef you might be, chicken breasts are not safe for earlier eaters to eat, okay? Chicken breasts are incredibly dry, even if you're a great chef, it's hard to make a very moist chicken breast. And the problem with chicken breast is they're a hundred percent pure protein, right? There's no carbohydrate in meat foods and there's no fat in chicken breast. So fat is really important when your baby is starting solid foods, fat is your friend.

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A babies need that fat for, they're still developing brain, but B, fat provides moisture, right? When you cook a higher fat meat product that has both the protein and the fat, the fat lubricates through the cooking process, which in turn coats the protein strands, making it easier and safer for your baby to swallow. And I want you to hang tight because in this episode I'm gonna share which cuts of chicken are actually better bets for your baby when they're starting solid foods. So let's dive in learning about How to Make, Chicken Safe for Baby, Led Weaning. Now, why would you even wanna feed your baby chicken? Okay, maybe it's a food that you eat. And ideally, we're getting to a point when we're starting solid foods that our baby by the age of one, will be getting most of their nutrition from food and ideally can be eating modified versions of the same foods the rest of the family eats.

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So if chickens of food in your repertoire, heck yeah, we wanna get your baby up to speed so that they can safely eat it from a nutrition standpoint. Okay? As a dietician, yes, of course chicken has protein and chicken has iron and zinc, but from a developmental standpoint, I also wanna point out that chicken offers a new taste for your baby. So there's new flavor compounds that are going into the system, plus it's a new texture opportunity and we want to be putting your baby through the ringer. With regards to the different textures, we do a texture progression in our program where we start out with soft Solid Foods, but very quickly, even in week one, we can do chicken if you prepare it safely for your baby. And I'll explain to you how to do that. Now, I mentioned the unsafe type of chicken.

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I don't do chicken breast for early eaters, that is due to the lack of fat. It is too dry, it is too hard for a baby who's just learning what to do with Solid Foods in their mouth to safely swallow. What types of chicken are then more ideal if chicken breasts are off the table? Well, I like to go for those fattier cuts of poultry that includes the legs, the wings, and the thighs. And I would say if like I were surrounded on a desert island and they were like, you could only have one type of chicken to feed your baby, what would it be? I would say, please can I have some chicken thighs? They can leave boneless, they can be skinless, they can be bone in, they can be skin on. I'm gonna get them to the point where there's nice soft shreddable strips of meat that I can offer to my baby. I'm gonna throw the skin away. I'm gonna take the bone out. But you can cook it with the skin and the bone on just at the end.

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We only offer the baby the soft shreddable strips of meat. And my mantra for meat is if you can tread the meat between your fingers and your thumb, then it's safe for your baby to eat with their gums. And you can't do that with chicken breasts. Chicken legs is pretty easy. I don't serve the chicken on the bone to babies until they have at least one tooth, but you can cook chicken legs and then take the meat off the bone and offer that to your baby. I also always offer those fattier cuts of meat, legs and wings and thighs. I do that with unsalted or no salt chicken broth. So a lot of our recipes, we show you how to make these nice soft shreddable cuts of chicken and recipes that use a lot of no salt broth. Then we reu utilize that to put it with the meat. So you put the chicken in the suction bowl and then you also add additional broth that adds more moisture, which again makes it safer and easier for your baby to swallow those foods.

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So how can you prepare the darker fattier cuts of chicken? Well, any way you would normally do it in your kitchen, but if You don't cook a lot, that includes things like a slow cooker. You can do it in a pressure cooker and you can do it on your stove top. If you have an instant pot, that can be a slow cooker or a pressure cooker. If you don't have any of those things and you just have a pot with a lid on it, you can do it on the stove top, we can do it roasted in the oven. There's lots of ways to bring out the flavor of chicken and to keep it moist so that it's safe for your baby to eat. Some of my favorite recipes, I'm just looking at the chicken section of my hundred First Foods content library. So if you have my hundred First Foods list, you'll see that there are 20 different protein foods. 10 are animal foods and 10 are plant foods. When you go into the program and you go to Protein and they're all listed in alphabetical order, go down to C, there's chicken, you click into that.

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There's recipes, videos, and instructions on how to make that for phase one of Baby Led Weaning, which are the first eight weeks. If you click on the video there, it will show you how to make One of my favorites is the Instant pot whole chicken. If you have a chicken and instant pot and one cup of water, you can make this incredibly affordable and delicious, safe whole chicken that your baby can eat. I save the rest for myself. I give the other parts to the baby, no brainer. We also have a fabulous chicken adobo recipe, which from a lot of our Filipino families over the years have given input to kind of tweak this recipe. It's awesome because it doesn't utilize soy sauce, so we use coconut aminos in place of soy sauce. So a much lower sodium option, but still tons of flavor. We also have a chicken mole recipe in there.

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One of my favorites is Greek lemon chicken soup. So lots of great ways that we can safely make your baby chicken depending upon what phase or stage of baby Led Weaning they're at. If you wanna check out those recipes, again, they're all inside of My program. BABY Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro, it has my hundred First, Foods, Daily, Meal Plan. If you don't wanna figure out when to feed chicken, we do a new fruit every week, a new vegetable, a new starchy food, a new protein, and a new allergenic food. I've got 20 weeks of meal plans laid out for you. Or if you'd like to choose your own adventure where you pick the five foods each week, I have a whole content library that has all the videos, instructions and recipes that show you how to make all the different foods on the hundred First Foods list for your baby. You can check that out at baby led weaning dot co slash program.

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So a quick win for you today if you are scared to start meat, I think the the best gateway meat. Sometimes I talk about ground meat as being a good gateway meat, and I have a whole episode all about how to make ground meat safe for your baby to eat because like you don't just like fry the ground meat up 'cause it falls apart. That doesn't work for baby led weeding. I'll link that episode if you're like, I'm not ready for chicken yet, but I'll do ground meat. But some families are like, you know, I'm gonna dive right in with chicken. So if that's your gateway meat, I want you to put chicken on the menu this week. The new protein food that your baby's gonna try this week, if you haven't already done it should be chicken. I'll put some of the resources from today's episode in the description. So including a goddess video on how to make the chicken adobo from my YouTube channel. I'll put the link to the program that has all of the chicken recipes for your baby's age agent stage.

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If you don't have the hundred First Foods list, take that free workshop, baby Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro, and put chicken on the menu. And I'd love to hear how chicken goes for your baby. If you're on Instagram, tag me at baby lead wean team. Everything's linked up on the show notes for this episode@blwpodcast.com slash 4 8 1. And a special 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@bwpodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.

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