When you have carefully selected the ingredients for your baby, studied the recipes, and are ready to roll up your sleeves to make a nutritious and delicious complementary food for your baby, there is one important thing that cannot be ignored, and that is to avoid the nutritional value of the ingredients. drain. How to do this?

Cleaning Tips

1. It is better to wash vegetables in cold water, and avoid soaking them for a long time.

2. The cleaning time should be as short as possible and avoid rubbing hard.

3. When soaking vegetables, it is best to use running water - turn the faucet smaller and let the water flow into the basin where the vegetables are soaked. The water in the basin will be constantly renewed with the arrival of fresh water. This effectively removes pesticides and avoids nutrient loss. Similarly, the soaking time should not be too long, 10-15 minutes is enough.

4. Wash first and then cut. The ingredients should be chopped as finely as possible to reduce cooking time.

Cooking Tips

1. Cut and cook now, fry and eat now. Sometimes, for the sake of convenience, we cut the ingredients and store them in a crisper for later use. However, as the storage time increases, nutrients are constantly lost. Vegetables, in particular, are rich in water-soluble B vitamins, vitamin C and inorganic salts, which will be destroyed and lost if not treated properly.

2. When making pasta, try to steam, boil, or bake as a complementary food, rather than frying.

3. Don’t waste the rice porridge soup, you can also give it to your baby, because after cooking, many nutrients have been integrated into the rice soup.

4. When making fillings, blanch the whole vegetables first, then chop them into pieces and mix with the fillings. Do not store cooked vegetables for a long time to avoid the formation of nitrite.

5. You can cut the ingredients slightly smaller, which can speed up the maturity of the food and reduce the loss of nutrients. If too much water is added when frying vegetables, a large amount of vitamins will dissolve in the water, and the vitamins will also be lost.

6. Reduce the number of rice washing times and soaking time to avoid the loss of water-soluble vitamins and inorganic salts in rice and noodles; try not to use alkali when making porridge or pasta, as alkali will destroy vitamins, proteins and minerals. Absorption of substances. When making vegetable porridge, wait until the porridge is almost cooked before adding vegetables.

7. Try to use an iron pot to make acidic food, which can improve the absorption rate of active iron.

8. When making bone soup, you can add a few drops of vinegar to facilitate the absorption of calcium.

9. The baby’s chewing ability is still relatively weak. When making meat supplements, you can make them thinner to make the nutrients easier to absorb.

How to use complementary foods to retain nutrients?

1. How to buy

1. Regarding how to purchase complementary food ingredients, we must first grasp the most critical point - freshness. Whether it is vegetables or meat, fresh ingredients retain more nutrients.

2. Try to buy as little finished food as possible. Finished food is definitely not as fresh as freshly made food. Some mothers will ask, what to do with rice noodles? In fact, don’t worry too much about this. The finished rice noodles add a lot of nutrients and have a more delicate texture. It’s not that you can’t eat finished complementary foods, but you should try to make fresh complementary foods for your baby if you have the energy.

2. How to do it

Vegetables

1. Wash first and then cut. Rinse with cold water and do not soak for too long.

2. For vegetables that need to be blanched, blanch them first and then chop them into small pieces to reduce the loss of vitamins and minerals.

3. Freshly cut and stir-fried, cooked and eaten immediately. Vegetables that are easy to cook can be stir-fried quickly to reduce the destruction of nutrients.

4. Do not leave ingredients and prepared complementary foods for too long.

Meat

1. Meat is rich in vitamins, proteins and minerals. When the baby is around 7-8 months old, pepsin and gastrointestinal flora are more fully developed and can start to be added. Meat is a complementary food, but the meat ingredients must be processed a little finer when initially added, so that they can be more easily absorbed.

2. Although meat is rich in nutrients, don’t just feed it meat all the time. Meat is an acidic food, so it is best to eat it with vegetables and other alkaline foods to maintain the acid-base balance in the body.

3. Meat is more difficult to digest than vegetables and fruits, so it must be cooked well when making it. It is better to use pureed food supplement when initially adding it. The production method is also based on steaming, without adding seasonings.

Starch

1. Reduce the number of rice washing times and soaking time.

2. Adding alkali when making porridge can increase the viscosity, but it will destroy the vitamins.

3. The cooking method is mainly steaming and reducing fried food.