Beef: How to Safely Offer Beef to Babies

Katie Ferraro (0s):

I've realized when it comes to cooking, I don't mind cooking, but I really don't like picking out like the recipe or what it is that I have to cook. When I was younger and I didn't have kids, I had more leisure time and downtime. I love nothing more than like browsing, cooking and recipe magazines. And my husband,Charlie, actually used to get mad at me 'cause I would bring my Bon Appetit magazines to the Padres baseball game and read recipes instead of paying attention to baseball with him. But now that I have to cook every day for kids and work, I just kind of like when it's all laid out for me. So right now I'm following my own 100 First Foods Daily Meal Plan. I'm making five new foods from that meal plan each week for my friend's baby Ezra. So he's doing baby-led weaning and our 100 First Foods program. And every Saturday I order or buy the groceries.

Katie Ferraro (42s):

Then I spend part of Sunday prepping the food for him and for my family for the whole week and then I basically don't have to think about what it is that we're going to eat all week 'cause it's already done, which I love. So we're heading into week 11 for baby Ezra. So that's gonna be foods number 51 to 55 for him. So we're more than halfway there to the 100 First Foods. And I wanna share the five new foods that I'm making for Ezra this week. 'cause I was just working on the shopping list inside of the Baby-Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro program. I have this whole hundred First Foods Daily Meal Plan. It has the shopping list for each week. It has the weekly menu, has the daily recipes. Again, it's all laid out for you so you don't have to use that part of your brain. I did it for you. Monday of every week we do a new fruit.

Katie Ferraro (1m 22s):

So this week it's orange. Tuesday we do a new vegetable, we're doing artichokes. I'm gonna make the artichokes the old fashioned way. And. then also show the family a really easy way to use canned artichokes, which is much faster. Wednesday, we do a new starchy food. So we're gonna do the whole grain called millet. Thursday is a new protein food. We're running through a lot of the plant protein foods now that we've done all the meat. So we're gonna be doing pinto beans, And, then Friday, we do a new allergenic food and it's going to be white fish. So we've already done all of the allergenic foods, we've done fatty fish, but I want to show and I show in the program how to make white fish safe for baby-led weaning. So if you wanna follow the same 100 First Foods Daily Meal Plan that we're doing, it's all part of my Baby-Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro program.

Katie Ferraro (2m 2s):

I've got the exact sequence of foods to feed as well as my 100 First Foods content library with all the instructions, videos, recipes. So you can learn how to safely prepare each of the foods from my 100 First Foods list. 'cause I want your baby to eat 100 foods before they turn one. And you can follow this exact meal plan and save that part of your brain so you don't have to pick out the foods. I did it all for you. You can try all these new foods 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 32s):

And when it comes to feeding babies beef, we don't offer solid pieces of beef like steak to babies. Okay, that is most certainly a choking hazard. You can however choose many different cuts of beef that will result in soft shreddable strips of cooked beef that are safe for babies to eat. There's many other cuts of beef out there besides steak. And some of my favorite cuts of beef for baby-led weaning are things like beef brisket, beef chuck roast, and country style beef ribs. These are totally safe for your baby to eat even from their first bites. 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.

Katie Ferraro (4m 17s):

I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leading you with the confidence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby-led weaning. Hello and welcome back. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about beef and how to safely offer beef to babies. So If, your family eats animal foods, then meats like beef are important sources of nutrients like iron and zinc, which we'll talk about today, as well as unique new flavor and texture profiles for even the earliest eater to begin starting eating these foods.

Katie Ferraro (4m 57s):

Now beef you might be like, wait a minute, why would I start with beef? There is no right or wrong food to start with when it comes to starting solid foods. And I've certainly done meats like beef in week one of starting solid foods for babies. Now spoiler alert, they're not actually going to eat that much early on and parents will be like, then what's the point? Why am I even gonna make this food? Well, there's a couple of reasons why we want to start getting nutrient rich foods like beef for families that eat animal foods into the diet early and often. One of them is actually to get you prepared to make these foods, to get you in the habit of making these foods on the regular for your baby. 'cause what happens to a lot of families is they kind of fall into the trap of, well, I'm just gonna make fruits and vegetables for my baby, right?

Katie Ferraro (5m 41s):

Those are healthy foods. And while it's certainly true that fruits and vegetables are quote-unquote healthy foods, they also do not provide complete nutrition. Now when you start solid foods, of course the majority of your baby's nutrition is still coming from infant milk. So that's breast milk and or formula. And we wanna offer a variety of foods, fruits and vegetables among them, but also starchy foods like whole grains. And the carbohydrates we want to offer the allergenic foods, many of which are protein foods. But we also wanna offer protein foods, both plant and animal foods. So if we look at foods like beef, you're probably aware that they do contain iron and your baby has gotten their iron primarily from breast milk or formula for the first six months of life.

Katie Ferraro (6m 26s):

But as you start weaning meaning gradually decreasing the amount of nutrition your baby is getting from milk, while at the same time they're gradually increasing the amount of nutrition they're getting from food, we want to incorporate iron-rich Foods like meats into the diet and you can get iron from both plants and animals. We've covered that extensively here on the podcast. I'll drop some other episodes with information about iron in them in the description here so that you can check those out if you'd like to learn more. But again, for those families that eat animal foods, meats like beef, provide an opportunity to kind of bridge that gap between milk and food where you're like, oh gosh, what iron containing foods can my baby eat? Beef is one of the best sources and meats in general are, and that's because the type of iron that's found in Meat, it's called heme iron.

Katie Ferraro (7m 10s):

And so heme iron is better absorbed by the human body that is non-heme, iron, the iron that comes from plant foods. So we recently covered plant-based sources of iron, and again, I'll share that episode if you want to learn more, but if you wanna incorporate some of the heme iron, I think Beef is a wonderful way to start. So I mentioned that from a nutrition standpoint, Beef contains iron. Beef also contains another important mineral called zinc and these minerals, which aren micronutrients, even though your baby's body needs them in very, very, very small quantities, they are very important to be incorporated into the weaning diet. And beef is one of the best sources of zinc in the diet. Beef also contains protein, it also contains B vitamins. So there's a lot of nutrition reasons why we would want to offer beef.

Katie Ferraro (7m 51s):

Now you might be wondering, how old can my baby be to start eating beef? Well, we don't wanna offer anything except infant milk, like breast milk or formula, until your baby turns six months of age and is showing the other reliable signs of readiness to eat. So as soon as they're are clear to start solid foods, meaning you pass the six month mark and your baby is sitting relatively on their own, okay? When you start thinking about the new foods that you're gonna offer each week I have a five step feeding framework where we offer five new foods each week. A new fruit on Monday, a new vegetable on Tuesday, a starchy food on Wednesday, and animal food, or protein food rather, on Thursday that can be plant or animal. And then the allergenic food on Friday. And so for those families that eat meat, I always encourage them, right in week one, just get in the habit of learning how to make these meats safe for baby.

Katie Ferraro (8m 35s):

'cause you certainly can. Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

Katie Ferraro (9m 17s):

Now what are some good cuts of beef for baby? I do not recommend offering solid pieces of meat like steak to early eaters. I don't do any solid pieces of meat like steak or pork chops until well after the baby turns one. Okay? I have found that in my experience that this is a choking hazard, that it's impossible to make steak shreddable. Okay? And we wanna offer soft shreddable strips of meat. My mantra is always, if you can shred that meat between your fingers and your thumb, then it's safe for the baby to eat with their gums. So keeping that in mind, let's focus on what cuts of beef. There are many, many cuts of beef out there, right? I think sometimes you'll see other accounts that say things like, oh, give steak to the baby.

Katie Ferraro (9m 59s):

And they don't realize that there's lots of other cuts of meat besides quote unquote steak that we would do on the grill, right? And there's lots of different cuts of steak even, but even, even the fatties softest cuts of steak, like for example, a filet is not going to pass that shred test for me to feel comfortable offering that to a baby. So the cuts of beef that I prefer for Babies are those that make the soft shreddable strips of beef. And two of my absolute favorite are beef chuck roast and beef brisket. Now you're in luck because these tend to be a little bit on the cheaper side. Brisket has gotten more expensive as it's gotten more popular with kind of barbecue culture in the last couple of years. But these tend to be what if cooked improperly can be really tough meats, okay?

Katie Ferraro (10m 42s):

But if which cooked properly can actually be very, very tender meats that make nice soft shreddable strips of meat, okay? And when you're choosing the selection of meat, you want to look for that marbling, okay? So that's where the fat is layered throughout the protein strands in the cut of meat because when you cook that meat, that fat, it's going to melt, it's going to lubricate those protein strands, which in turn makes it safer for your baby to swallow. And then when we offer the cooked brisket strips, usually in strips about the size of your adult pinky finger or the cooked beef chuck row strips, again in about shreddable pieces around the size of your adult pinky finger, we do that with lots of additional low sodium or no salt beef broth.

Katie Ferraro (11m 26s):

So I use a lot of no salt beef broth when I'm cooking recipes from my 100 First Foods Daily Meal Plan or I'm making foods from my 100 First Foods content library 'cause I want your baby to have that extra moisture that again will help make it easier for your baby to swallow. So beef chuck roast is a good option. Beef brisket is a good option. If you have an instant pot, it works wonderful in there. You can either slow cook it, I'll usually do for a large size roast, you know, maybe 5/6 pounds. I'll do it on high for about six hours or on low for about eight hours with one to two cups of broth or more if you like it soupy-er. Or if you're a little short on time pressure cooking, usually for a larger roast pressure, cooking on high for 60 to 75 minutes.

Katie Ferraro (12m 9s):

if you use the pressure cooker setting on your instant pot, or if you have a traditional slow cooker, you can use that or a crock pot if you just have a pot with a lid on top of it. One thing I've actually been working on the last couple of months is redoing all of the recipes inside of my Baby-Led weaning with Katie Ferraro program to incorporate instructions for both instant pot as well as cooking it on a stove top for families that don't have any sort of, you know, countertop appliance and then also cooking it in the oven as well. So literally if you have a pot and you have a cut of meat and you have a couple of cups of no salt broth, you can make all of these recipes safe for your baby. And if you wanna check out some of those recipes, they're inside of my program.

Katie Ferraro (12m 51s):

if you go to babyledweaning.co/program, you can find how you join with. That's where all of the content library is to make all these foods. It's also where my hundred First Foods Daily Meal Plan is. If you're like, I just wanna follow along day by day, I'm gonna put you through in the first nine weeks, we do nine of the 10 animal protein foods right out of the gate. And we usually find that by about week nine families are like, oh wow, I am super confident in my ability to make Meat safe for my baby to eat. And again, if those are foods that your family eats, I want your baby to be able to eat those foods as well. A third cut of Meat that I think is really helpful for families who are a little reticent about trying like the bigger roast type pieces of meat is ground beef.

Katie Ferraro (13m 31s):

Okay? I sometimes call ground meat the gateway meat, like it feels a little bit less intimidating. Like I think most people out there would agree that they could make a burger. Okay, so we make a lot of baby-led weaning burgers out of all different types of ground meat, ground bison, and you can do ground veal or ground lamb, ground turkey, ground chicken, but ground beef is readily available. I would encourage you to choose the fattier cuts. So we don't want that like extra lean, like 93% fat-free. No, we don't mess around with the fat-free stuff, okay? We want more fat in that cut of meat. Later on, when your baby gets older, you can stress out about the amount of saturated fat that they're eating right now. I don't want you to worry about the fat other than I want you to pick the fattier cuts of meat because they're safer for your baby to eat.

Katie Ferraro (14m 11s):

Now if you are exploring with ground beef as a way to make, let's say a little baby-led weaning burger for your baby burgers, always work better and stick together better. if you can incorporate an egg. So an egg is a potentially allergenic food, right? We wanna make sure your baby has passed egg so had egg on its own a number of times without reaction before you incorporate it into something like a burger. So do egg on its own right? And in our program we do egg, usually in week two of baby-led weaning, might bring beef in in week three where you know your baby's not allergenic to egg. So now you're gonna take maybe a half a pound of ground beef, mix it with whatever seasoning. I love to use like Chinese five spice seasoning, for example, a teaspoon of that. And then I would also do one egg, mix it up really well with my hands, form it into patties about the size of my, the palm of my adult hand fry those, okay, until it is cooked then let it cool and then cut those burger strips into pieces about the size of your adult pinky finger.

Katie Ferraro (15m 7s):

And then offer them out of a suction mat or bowl so your baby can pick up the pieces of meat and bring it to their mouth. Would also recommend in that case having just get a quart of no salt beef broth and have that on hand, kind of top it or drizzle it on top of the burgers in case they're a little bit dry. Again, we want to use the broth to add that extra moisture for a safe swallow. Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

Katie Ferraro (16m 40s):

When it comes to cooking beef products for your baby, it really is important to have a meat thermometer. Okay? I know some of you consider yourself accomplished cooks, but you cannot eyeball when meat is done. And for Babies, it is particularly important that we be vigilant about food safety. And so when it comes to ground beef products, we wanna make sure that a safe internal cooking temperature for ground beef is 160 degrees Fahrenheit and 160 degrees Fahrenheit is also the internal temp of when you're cooking roast like the larger cuts of meat for when they're done about medium. So medium, somewhere between medium to well done, somewhere between one 60 to one 70 for the roast is good.

Katie Ferraro (17m 23s):

And again, just don't even try to guess because you're never gonna guess properly. Just get yourself a good quality meat thermometer. They do not have to be that expensive, but ensure that your baby's meat is cooked properly all of the way through so that it's safe in addition to delicious for your baby. So again, beef is a nutrient rich source of iron, zinc, and protein. It offers new taste and texture and flavor opportunities for your baby. We do not offer solid pieces of beef like steak to babies as this is a choking hazard. But you can however, make soft shreddable strips of cooked beef that are safe for your babies to eat. Some of my favorite cuts of beef for baby-led weaning are beef brisket, beef chuck roast. I also love country style beef ribs. I should do a whole separate episode on rib Meat and country style beef ribs aren't technically rib meat, but they're like nice soft shreddable pieces of meat that tend to be very affordable and have got some great slow cooker recipes for those.

Katie Ferraro (18m 12s):

We do have ground meat kind of separated out in our program from actual beef because again, we don't wanna just offer it one time and say we're, we're done. We wanna continually offer these foods to your babies. And I wanna show you lots of different safe, affordable ways to make the different cuts of beef safe for your baby. And don't forget that when you're at the meat counter or the grocery store and you're selecting your cuts of beef for your baby, you want to stick to those fattier cuts of meat. 'cause when that meat cooks the fat melts and it lubricates the protein strands and that makes it easier for the baby to swallow. So you wanna look for those cuts of meat with lots of marbling, And then steer clear of the extra lean cuts, which may be too dry for babies to safely swallow. So marbling are those white flecks of fat that are within the meat muscle and then there's lots and lots of ways that you can season beef.

Katie Ferraro (18m 57s):

Remember, babies do not need to eat bland food in our program. The suggested seasonings that we have for beef include mustard or tarragon. Again, I've got lots of great recipes for making all of the foods from the 100 First Foods list safe for your baby to eat. You can find those inside of my Baby-Led weaning with Katie Ferraro program that's available at babyledweaning.co/program. Thank you so much for listening and good luck making beef safe for your baby to eat. 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?

Katie Ferraro (19m 37s):

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 hundred First Foods content library so you can see and learn exactly how to prep all of the 100 foods as well as my original a 100 Days Meal Plan. 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.

Katie Ferraro (20m 21s):

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