Saving on Baby Food. Home Made Sweet Potato Puree Recipe and Cost.

 

  If you are just tuning into my series on making your own baby food you may want to read the first of the series.  For this baby recipe I decided to compare the cost of buying prepackaged sweet potatoes with homemade baby sweet potatoes as well as show you how easy it is to make it at home. 

  Sweet potatoes are my daughters favorite.  What can I say she has good taste.  Lets start with the recipe and then look at the cost breakdown shall we?  All you will need for this is a sweet potato, small sheet of tin foil, a blender, food processor or baby food maker, a quarter cup of water and your oven.  If you've got all that you are ready to roll.

1.  Start by heating your oven to 350
2.  While that is heating wash your sweet potato
3.  Next you want to poke a few holes in the potato with a fork and cover it in tin foil
4.  The potato will bake for about 2 hours ( You want is good and mushy)
5.  After letting it cool for a few minutes you should be able to just pull the skin right off
6.  Into the blender it goes along with a quarter cup of water
7.  Blend it for about 30 seconds, shake or mix it up and then blend again for 30 seconds
8.  Voila sweet potato baby food.  As my six year old would say "easy peasy mom"

  For my experiment I used an 11 oz sweet potato.  The average cost of sweet potatoes in my store is .99 per lb.  So that sweet potato cost me .68.  When it was all made up the potato yielded almost 8 oz of puree.  That gives me a cost of 8.5 cents per ounce. In the stores around me the typical sale price for stage two baby food is 14.3 cents per ounce.

  While I would not say that making my own sweet potato baby food will make huge strides in my plans for an early retirement I can tell you this:  If she were to only eat sweet potatoes and she were to eat about 15 ounces a day of them ( typical for her at 6 months) I would save $26.10 in one month versus store bought. Not to shabby....