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Making your own Brown Rice Cereal for your baby is easy, economical, fun and a healthy choice when beginning to transition your baby to solids.
What is Brown Rice Cereal?
Brown rice cereal is a popular breakfast made from pulverized whole grain brown rice. It’s often one of the first solid foods introduced to babies because it’s packed with nutrients and easy to digest. You can buy brown rice baby cereal in the grocery store, but it’s extremely simple and more cost effective to make it at home! All you need is a blender and brown rice — it’s truly the easiest meal you can make for your baby.
Why Make Homemade Brown Rice Cereal for Your Baby
- Nutritious: Packed with iron, magnesium and other vitamins and minerals, homemade brown rice cereal makes a perfect first food for babies. Its nutritional value surpasses white rice cereal, where all the good stuff is stripped out, leaving not much behind.
- Cost Effective: The other awesome part about the homemade version of brown rice baby cereal is that it costs a mere fraction of what you can pay for boxed rice cereal. Why spend all that money on one simple ingredient? Even if you buy the most expensive organic brown rice you can find, per serving you’ll still be paying less than the store bought version.
- Engaging Activity: Whizzing up the brown rice in the blender is a visual stimulant for little ones. I always loved making this recipe when my kids were babies because they were fascinated with watching the blender and it was a great way for them to make early connections about where their food comes from.
- Versatile: You can easily customize brown rice cereal to suit your baby’s taste preferences. Its mild flavor lends itself to be easily transformed when other ingredients are added to it.
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How to Make Brown Rice Cereal
- Place the brown rice in a spice grinder or blender for 45 seconds-1 minute or until finely ground.
- To Store: Store the rice powder in a sealed container in the refrigerator or in a cool dark place.
- To prepare 1 serving for a 4-6 month old baby: bring 1/2 cup of water to a boil and sprinkle in 2 tablespoons of the ground brown rice.
- Whisk continuously for 30 seconds, reduce to a simmer and stir occasionally for 4-5 minutes or until the mixture is thick and creamy to prevent any lumps from forming.
- Serve as is or with one of the additions below.
Brown Rice Cereal Additions
Brown rice cereal is a great base for many flavors. Here are some ideas for ingredients to add to your baby’s brown rice cereal recipe:
- Molasses
- Mashed banana
- Mashed raspberries
- Puréed pears, peaches or apricots
- Mashed avocado
- Apple sauce
- Breast milk or formula
With its numerous health benefits, simple preparation and cost-effectiveness, it’s no surprise that many parents turn to brown rice baby cereal when they’re transitioning to solids. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments and tag me on social media if you make this or any weelicious baby foods!
Homemade Brown Rice Cereal
Equipment
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup short grain brown rice (I like to use organic brown rice)
Instructions
- Place the brown rice in a spice grinder or blender for 45 seconds-1 minute or until finely ground.
- To Store: Store the rice powder in a sealed container in the refrigerator or in a cool dark place.
- To prepare 1 serving for a 4-6 month old baby: bring 1/2 cup of water to a boil and sprinkle in 2 tablespoons of the ground brown rice.
- Whisk continuously for 30 seconds, reduce to a simmer and stir occasionally for 4-5 minutes or until the mixture is thick and creamy to prevent any lumps from forming.
- Serve as is or with one of the additions below.
Thanks for this great idea. I still cannot make it right though.. my baby doesn’t like the texture, making sour face and shaking off 🙂 I will try again later as I really like this recipe idea. Blending after cooking didn’t work either as it was all to sticky, even adding water or milk didn’t help.
Is there any reason not to do this the other way around? I mean cook the rice and then puree it with a hand blender? i used to do that with oatmeal and it turned out a great texture.
Thanks so much for this recipe! It will definitely help everyone out there realize how easy it is to make.
Such an improvement over commercial rice cereals – especially for those children with allergies. Our son is allergic to dairy, soy, gluten and nuts, so we searched everywhere for rice cereal that did not have soy or soy lecithin in it for weeks! Finally, there was only one brand we could find, and it was special order from our local health food store.
Our lesson learned? Home made is always better (and less expensive!)
You would need to prepare the formula with water first. This way you can thin it down until the desired consistency.
So if it’s too thick you can take the prepared formula (like you would have in a bottle for baby to drink) and add it until it’s thin enough for your baby.
You said we can add in formula milk into the brown rice. Do we just add the milk powder alone and stir the brown rice? Or do we prepare the formula milk powder with water first, then add into the brown rice?
You used one of my all time favorite imaegs! Soooo pretty! What a great card!Thanks for joining the Wild Orchid Crafts Challenge this time around!Hugs, Dena
How long did you cook it for? The longer you cook it, the more thicker it gets.
Love this idea! I tried to make it the other day and using the measurements specified it would not thicken. Any ideas what I am doing wrong?
I have just made a batch. I washed the rice then put it in the blender and the powdered rice was quite dry. The wet stuff seemed to stick to the edges and I didn’t scrape it off. I have put it into an airtight container in the fridge and so far so good.
Do u wash and dry the brown rice first before grinding them into powder? If so, how do you dry the rice?
Hi!! New here!! Baby #3 coming this summer and I plan to make more of his food then I did with the others :).
I made some but not all. I hope to be 90% homemade. (it’s so lazy, I mean easy to toss a non perishable one in the bag for long days out)
What a great idea, I can’t wait to try this out 🙂
Thanks Katherine. I was just going to scour your site for old baby food posts and I couldn’t believe you posted brown rice cereal just yesterday. I’ve been reading your blog since my twins were 8 months old (they just turned 3) and now I am ready to start making my own baby food again for my sweet new daughter, Everly. Thanks for such a fabulous blog!
Trina
some probiotics say to only add to cold food.
Just make sure the probiotic is in the fridge section as their more likely to have the good bacteria in there. Just my 2 cents!
Looks like you can. I’ve got packets of FlorastorKids probiotics that I add to expressed milk when baby gets a bottle. The package says it can be added to apple sauce and other soft baby foods.