Advice for making your own baby cereal

[theclockticksslowly]

My baby is 5 months so I'm looking into the options available for when it comes to putting her on solids. I fancy making my own baby cereal but wanted to ask for tips and advice from anyone doing it:

Eg - which grains do you use? How do you grind it? Do you mix with water/breastmilk/formula?

Any advice will be great thanks!

I just used ordinary oats to make porridge, but blended them first to make a smoother mix. I made it up with full fat cows milk, which is fine to use in cooking as an ingredient from 6 months.

Ready brek all the way here! Mixed with formula as weaned all of mine a bit before 6 months. Full fat milk from 6 months onwards. So much better and cheaper than branded baby cereals. And less sugar .

It's good to use a variety of grains so you aren't giving gluten every day at once - millet and pearl barley are very mild tasting, but you need to grind it first in a blender to make it almost into a powder before cooking it. Takes a while to cook, but you can cook loads then put it in ice cube trays to freeze then just reheat as and when.

Amaranth is also good - quite bitter tasting but my son loved it. Doesn't need blending first and turns into a nice sticky 'porridge'. Can also be frozen.

I put some pureed/mashed fruit on all of them.

As DS1 loved the 4 grain Plum (brand) porridge I attempted to make my own version so used:
Quinoa flakes
Popped (unsweetened) rice - Kallo brand is good
Porridge oats

And ground it up so as fine a powder as possible. It can still be a little grainy for them at first so I usually cook it as porridge or make it as a kind of Bircher muesli with milk soaked for at least 1 hour in fridge and a little fruit puree mixed in at the end to either cooked or cold version to make extra yummy.

Just basic oats are good enough. There's evidence that says that a daily dose of porridge oats is the perfect food to encourage healthy gut flora.

Mine have porridge every morning, with yoghurt or with different fruit mashed in. Ds loves his with a stewed apple (that I batch cook and freeze in ice cube trays and pop one out to mix into the oats, it cools it down too!) and cinnamon.

Basic oats here and wheatabix as well as shredded wheat occasionally. but we did blw so no spoon feeding so had to be stuff he could pick up himself.

Another for basic oats too. I grind them into a powder, make porridge with whole milk, then stir in pureed fruit (home made from the freezer) and full-fat Greek yogurt. My 9mo dd loves it and I'm always happy to help her finish it on the days when she's less hungry, as it's blummin gorgeous.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone! Sounds tastier than my own breakfast! Is a coffee grinder good for grinding oats be everything?