Baby's First Bites: Bone Marrow
Fun Videos of the cutest babies eating bone marrow (6 months+)
Bone marrow may be introduced as soon as your baby is ready to start solids, typically around 6 months old.
What exactly is bone marrow?
Bone marrow is the jelly-like tissue in the middle of animal bones.
It’s a trendy restaurant food that’s actually quite affordable (and ridiculously easy!) to prepare at home. Ask your butcher for “long, cross-cut” bones, which will make it easier for you to get the most marrow from the bone once it’s roasted.
Large birds learned to drop bones out of the sky to crash down and break the marrow open for their enjoyment.
Why give it to your baby?
When thinking about those incredible first bites of food, most of us hear of iron-added rice cereals and fruit. But I want my baby to get used to more savory foods first - the dense (naturally full of iron) foods like bone marrow and liver! These are some of the most nutrient packed foods on the planet! (aside from maybe seaweed and mussels, more amazing baby options!).
Once babies learn the taste of sweet, they push all other things to the side. But if you think about nature, you wouldnt be eating fruit all day, all year. Our bodies are meant to search fruit out when it is in abundance, but we were never meant to eat pineapples in winter, or strawberries all year round (and the flavor sufferes because of this too!). Even maple syrup is a pain stakingly long process of hoses hooked up to trees all winter, but we miss out on the process and just get the sugar straight into our bodies, 24/7.
We picked out our babies first foods incredibly thoughtfully. Lots of mushed greens, and always us taking bites along with him (which he loved!). We added in some licks of an apple core, and saw his face light up. But he is so good with eating all we have given so far, and we dont want to mess with that yet!
So we had been pushing off Luca’s first bites for a couple weeks. He was sitting up, but we just hadent gotten around to mashing stuff for him yet. As we started to eat our dinner, we pulled out our bone marrow bones, and thought, hey, this stuff is pretty energy dense, and so mushy already! AND HE LOVED IT. Our babies first food was bone marrow. LOL
And we checked the internets (after… possibly a bad idea, but we were using our best judgement), and the consensus was total agreement. WHY DONT MORE PEOPLE THINK OF THIS!? Our baby is not eating rice cereal for a long while. There are too many other good foods out there!
Nutritional Profile
Soft in texture, loaded with iron and healthy fates, packed with B-vitamins, and lots of bone building material. It is actually a true baby super food!
It is also NOT a common food allergen.
Ways to Eat Bone Marrow
We cook ours for 30 min at about 350F. (or 20 at 425). It can be scraped out, slurped, or licked, or spread onto toast. For being such a “fancy” kind of food, it tends to make you feel quite primitive!
To whip it:
scoop the marrow out and into a bowl. Also, pour all fat from your baking sheet and into the bowl. Place it in the refrigerator.
Once the marrow is cold (the fat should firm up), use a mixer with a whisk attachment to whip until the bone marrow is white and fluffy.
Whipped marrow lasts 3 weeks in the fridge and 6 months in the freezer.
When to give your baby
For babies 6 to 12 months old: Spread roasted bone marrow on bread, thin rice cakes, or baby crackers. You may also whip roasted bone marrow with breast milk or formula and/or mix into other foods, such as mashed potatoes. Don’t go crazy though: a little goes a long way!
12 to 24 months old: Slather roasted bone marrow on bread with thick crusts, such as sourdough, and give your toddler the time to really work at chewing and tearing. Roasted bone marrow can also be spread atop roasted veggies and other foods to boost the fat content.
Note: It can be a choking hazard. There are sometimes little bone scrapes, or globs of fat that need to be broken up before given to your baby. I like to spoon out perfect chunks and save for him, but you can also mix it with something else and whip it up with something like breast milk, as in the recipe below.
Why we are obsessed.
There are some foods for baby that I literally obsess over. These foods are largely underused and yet packed with many of the nutrients that babies need. Plus. it is DELICIOUS. Even babies love it at first lick.
Liver is one. And bone marrow is another.
Bone marrow is found inside of bones. And it’s a production powerhouse, full of life-giving stem cells – pumping out red blood cells, white blood cells, bone cells, and fat cells.
Bone marrow also has vasculature moving blood to and fro. And where you find blood, you find iron.
Iron is a big deal for babies. It’s a meaty mineral that I love to love. You can find hints of my obsession all over the place – on Instagram, in blog posts, and in this online class for beginning solids. Chances are, your pediatrician is also interested in your baby’s iron levels.
But why?
Iron is brain food. For example, research reveals that babies who are anemic before the age of two have lower scores in school achievement and cognition from 4 – 19 years of age.
Iron supports myelination. It turns out you can find quite a bit of iron in the brain cells that produce myelin. Myelin-making brain cells = white matter in the brain…and white matter = intelligence.
Iron deficiency cannot be undone. Even when corrected, low levels of iron during babyhood – or iron deficiency anemia – has been found to impact language development, motor development, and emotional development.
Then, DO NOT throw out the bones until you make stock!
The bones are very gelatinous. When roasting, you’re really just going after the fatty marrow. So all the tough collagen on the side of the bones and the bone itself breaks down in the stock. You’ll find you can’t get everything out of the bones, and the long (6-8 hour) slow cooked broths break it all down.
Once upon a time, bones were handed off neighbor to neighbor, to continue using the same bones many times over in stocks.
