Do you have to buy baby rice or will normal ground rice do?

[Gemmasmummy]

I always wondered about this when weaning my first baby. Now I'm expecting no.2 and thinking about the huge cost savings I could make by buying normal ground rice instead of special baby rice. Is there any reason why babies shouldn't be fed ground rice, as long as it's finely ground enough to make a puree.

I tried this but ground rice you actually have to cook to make it soft.

Just cook ordinary rice and puree it yourself with a hand blender, if you like.

I used ground rice flour at 5 mths as it was exactly what the baby rice ingredients are. DS never ever complained.

DS has a huge appetite and the cost saving was significant. I just used as normal and mixed it with a pureed fruit.

Go for it

Mummymonster - did you have to cook it first or did you make the puree straight from the packet?

Mummymonster - did you have to cook it first or did you make the puree straight from the packet?

I just used mashed potato second time round

skip baby rice - it's foul stuff. I went straight to fruit with BabyDragon (and DS2 I think, although I may have used 1/2 the sample pack I got in a Bouny bag or similar!)

Hi Gemmasmummy...

No I didn't cook it as the baby rice was never cooked tbh...I just mixed it with expressed breast milk and warmed it to edible temp in the microwave, that's not really cooking is it?

I used the half kilo bag of rice flour tesco have in the speciality food section. It's a finer rade than the baby rice so it was inital apperance is sloppier but it does work. It firms up to the same consistency.

The cost saving is immense if you think about it.

second mashed potato, they really do prefer it.

And mashed banana. They love that! Cooked apple and pear is very smooth, pears are in season atm.

Ditto Colditz. My DD loves any homemade fruit or veg puree.

Only justifiable use for rice is to mix with fruit puree to make it a but more bulky as tastes gross on its own.

Oh I agree that baby rice is foul and once I could I always mixed it with a fruit puree. Then as he progressed to 3 and 3 meals a day we just kept it for breakfast.

We moved on to mashed vegies, especially sweet potato and butternut squash.

You don't have to give rice at all, nor do you have to puree anything. You could do blw and go straight for pieces of real food.

I must be missing something here.

I only used baby rice for about the first three weeks of weaning first on its own then mixed with fruit or veg. I think I used 1/2 a packet of the stuff and still have 3 1/2 packets of it left( bought enthusiastically by my mum to add to rookiebabies bottle, don't even ask). I gave up on it fairly quickly as I like to have a little taste of what DS is having and it doesn't add much flavour wise.

Whilst I think its great to save money is my DS deprived by not having eaten vast quantities of baby rice ?

I'd actually say he was lucky Rookiemum .

the only difference to baby rice is that it has extra iron added but if lo has a good diet and still plenty of formula or breast milk o wouldn't say it would be an issue.