Eggs: 7 Easy Ways to Safely Offer Your Baby Eggs
- Why eggs are one of the easiest allergenic foods to offer to your baby...and why we no longer wait on feeding babies egg white until after age 1
- 7 different ways that babies can safely eat eggs - and why scrambled eggs aren’t the best bet for early eaters
- A vegan substitute for eggs if you don’t eat eggs because of egg allergy or because your family does not eat animal products

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Episode Description
Introducing eggs early and often is key to helping prevent egg allergy…but, figuring out how to safely offer those eggs to your baby can be tricky. In this episode, I’m breaking down 7 easy ways to safely offer eggs using the baby-led weaning approach. From quick prep methods to texture tips that support self-feeding, you’ll walk away with practical ideas you can put to use in your own kitchen starting this week.
Links from this Episode
- Easy zucchini egg cup recipe for baby-led weaning from my Instagram account @babyledweanteam is here.
- Baby-Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro program with the 100 First Foods™ Daily Meal Plan, join here: https://babyledweaning.co/program
- Baby-Led Weaning for Beginners free online workshop with 100 First Foods™ list to all attendees, register here: https://babyledweaning.co/baby-led-weaning-for-beginners
Other episodes related to this topic
- Episode 15 - Egg: How to Introduce Your Baby to This Potentially Allergenic Food
- Episode 124 - Using an Egg Ladder for Babies with Egg Allergy with Carina Venter, PhD, RD
- Episode 143 - BLW Basics: How to Make Fritters for Self-Feeding Babies
- Episode 487 - Egg Substitute Ideas for Baby-Led Weaning (...that actually work)

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Stokke (1s):
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Katie Ferraro (2m 2s):
and for the steamed of an egg cups recipe. I love this because you can do like a dozen at a time. You bake these off in a mini loaf pan or just muffin tins that you put on top of a pan of boiling water. And so it kind of creates this steam like effect in your oven and you pick 'em at 300 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes, you cool 'em, cut 'em into pieces about the size of your adult pinky finger. It's a perfect finger food for your baby and it's got that texture of like if you've ever had the sous egg bites from Starbucks, I love those, but of course they have way too much sodium in them for babies. But you can make these at home super easy and it's another way for you to constantly be reintroducing that potentially allergenic food, protein egg back into your baby's diet.
Katie Ferraro (2m 45s):
Hey there, I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietitian, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby-led weaning Here on the baby-led weaning with Katie Ferraro podcast. I help you strip out all the noise and nonsense about feeding, giving you the confidence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby-led weaning. Well, hello and welcome back. Today we are diving into one of the most common and probably confusing potentially allergenic foods for babies and that's Eggs. Now you've probably heard that introducing Eggs early and often can help prevent egg allergy down the road and that certainly is the case.
Katie Ferraro (3m 28s):
But when it comes to actually how do you prepare those Eggs safely for baby-led weaning, a lot of parents will be like, I'm just gonna do scrambled egg. But spoiler alerts, scrambled Eggs don't work well for early eaters. In today's episode, I'm gonna share seven easy ways that you can safely offer your baby Eggs. Now this episode is not about why we do Eggs. We covered that back in episode 15. So episode 15 was all about egg and then why you wanna introduce this potentially allergenic food to your baby. Today's episode is all about how do we actually make those Eggs safe? Each week I put out two new episodes Here on the baby-led weaning podcast. I do a solo training episode every Monday and then on Thursday it's a longer interview style episode.
Katie Ferraro (4m 11s):
Be sure that you're subscribed wherever you're listening to or watching this so that you can get notified each week when the two episodes are live. So let's dive in talking about Eggs in seven Easy Ways to Safely Offer Your Baby Eggs. Now I like to start each of these mini training episodes with a baby-led weaning tip of the day. Today's tip is if your baby is allergic to Eggs or you don't eat Eggs, normally that's because a family would be vegan. There is a very easy egg substitute. Now this does not work for the introduction of the allergenic food protein because of course if you're not eating egg, you're not offering your baby the egg protein. But when you're looking at baby-led wing recipes and you're like, oh, but we don't eat Eggs, you can make a very simple egg substitute.
Katie Ferraro (4m 51s):
So to make an egg substitute, we use either chia seed or flaxseed. So if you take one tablespoon of chia or flaxseed and mix that with three tablespoons of water, stir it around with a fork, let it sit for about 10 minutes, it'll kind of gelatinize and become like the texture of an egg. And that is the equivalent of one egg if you're baking or cooking. It doesn't work perfectly in all baking applications, but it works pretty well in fritters. And we're gonna talk a bit about fritters today. If you wanna learn more about egg substitutes, go listen to episode 4 87 that was called Egg Substitute Ideas for baby-led weaning that actually work. And be sure to listen through to the end. Today I'm gonna be sharing all seven of my favorite ways to make Eggs for baby-led weaning along with a few more recipe ideas.
Katie Ferraro (5m 36s):
So I wanna tell you a quick story about egg introduction. A lot of parents will do egg once or twice and then be like, oh, my baby's not allergic to egg and move on. I do wanna remind you that if your going to have an allergic reaction to food, it will usually occur on the second or subsequent occasion. So it generally is not the first time the baby tastes or has that new potentially allergenic food where they're gonna have the reaction. It's gonna be the second one or later. Now in my program we do five new foods a week. That's my five step feeding framework. So we do a new fruit on Monday, a vegetable on Tuesday, a starchy food on Wednesday, a protein food on Thursday, and that allergenic food on Friday. We do the allergenic food twice on Friday, twice on Saturday and twice on Sunday. No other new foods across the weekend.
Katie Ferraro (6m 17s):
You can always continue to incorporate familiar foods from previous days, but basically by the end of that weekend your baby has tried that potentially allergenic food at least six times. Now most parents will be like, well, what if they get allergic on the seventh time? And there was a mom in My program, baby-led Weaning with Katie Ferraro recently, who had fed her baby egg 15 times. Like she was so anal, she wrote it down every single time she was counting all the time she did the different allergenic foods. But on the 15th time, her baby had a full blown allergic reaction to egg. They ended up following through with her pediatrician getting a referral to a pediatric allergist. The baby did end up having a confirmed egg allergy, but that's pretty unusual.
Katie Ferraro (6m 58s):
It's usually not 15 times before you're gonna see the reaction. Most families, if their baby's gonna have an allergic reaction to food, they're gonna see it sometime in that first, You know, five to six exposures. But I just wanna remind you that it can keep happening after that. And the reason why I'm sharing a lot of different ideas on how you can make Eggs safe for your baby is 'cause I want to reinforce that idea that it's not just a one and done situation, right? We don't just offer the baby egg one time and then be like, oh, they're fine, and move on to the next allergenic food. I want you to continually be reintroducing these food proteins to your baby that helps reduce that risk of food allergy down the road. So let's get started looking at the seven different ways that you can make Eggs safely for baby-led weaning. Number one, fried egg strips.
Katie Ferraro (7m 39s):
This is probably my most favorite, definitely my easiest go to. Like if a baby's coming over for a parent coaching session and we wanna do an allergenic food and like I don't care which one. And just as a reminder, it does not matter in which order you introduce the allergenic foods, right? There's the top nine allergenic foods, those are the nine foods that account for about 90% of food allergy in North America. You wanna introduce those foods early and often. It doesn't matter in what order you go in my 100 First Foods Daily Meal Plan, we do do egg quite early on though, 'cause it kind of opens up a bunch of other food opportunities that your baby can try and I'll talk about those in a moment. But egg is an easy one to start with. And because peanut egg and cow's milk are the three most common pediatric food allergies, a lot of times I'll just start with egg or do that in the top three as far as the first three weeks of baby-led weaning goes and fried egg strips are so super easy.
Katie Ferraro (8m 30s):
Now, if your baby has not yet had cow's milk protein, a separate allergenic food, then I don't fry the egg strips and butter, right? 'cause butter has cow's milk in it. If your baby has had formula, of course You know your baby's not allergic to cow's milk in that case because the base of commercial infant formula is cow's milk based. But if your baby's been exclusively breastfed and never had cow's milk yet, don't do egg fried and butter if they've never had cow's milk. 'cause that way you're introducing two allergenic foods for the first time at the same time. We don't wanna do that, right? It's perfectly fine to do one new food a day or more than one new food a day. We just don't do two new potentially allergenic foods at the same time. So don't do a new allergenic food, egg fried in butter, a separate allergenic food cow's milk if your baby hasn't already passed cow's milk.
Katie Ferraro (9m 12s):
So what do You do? You use oil, okay? Whatever cooking oil you use at your house works well for baby-led weaning 'cause you don't want that egg to stick to the pan. Really simple pro tip for making fried Eggs for babies is that when you break the egg into the frying pan, use your fork to break the yolk up and kind of spread it around the white. So crack the egg, break the yolk, spread the yolk around the egg. The reason why I do that is because the white of the egg, that is where the protein is located, okay? And the protein part of the food, that's the potentially allergenic part. We want your baby to try that. But the yolk also has a really valuable nutrition, right? That's where the iron is. That's where the beef vitamins, where the fat is. So we want your baby to get those components of the egg as well.
Katie Ferraro (9m 53s):
So if you combine 'em together, You know your baby's not going to eat very much egg early on. But if they do get a couple bites in their mouth, we want it to be a combination of the nutritious stuff as well as the protein. So do the egg and the yolk together. You do not need to separate them. Really, really, really old outdated information was like, oh, it's safe to feed babies egg yolk before one and not safe to feed babies egg white until after age one. That is not the case. All current research and updated guidelines point to the early introduction of egg foods to help reduce egg allergy down the road. That includes both the yolk and the white. So fried egg strips is number one. Number two, hard boiled Eggs. I love hard boiled Eggs for baby-led weaning. And the reason why is because if you think about the texture opportunities in a hard boiled egg, the egg white is rubbery, the egg yolk is mealy.
Katie Ferraro (10m 40s):
Those are two really unique texture properties. Babies love hard boiled Eggs. I like to do my hard boiled Eggs in an instant pot. It's such an easy way to do 'em. Okay? So you just basically take your instant pot and if you have the trivi that it came with, put the trit in the Instant Pot. Pour one cup of water in there. You can put up to a dozen Eggs on the Instant pot and then turn it on high. So pressure cook it on high for five minutes. Then I do the steam release for five minutes and then I put it in an ice water bath for five minutes. So it's 5, 5, 5, 5 minutes high pressure in the instant pot release, five minutes ice bath, five minutes, and then pro tip to get the shells off of your hard boiled Eggs with minimal amount of tragedy.
Katie Ferraro (11m 22s):
Peel those Eggs under running water. So I'll just have like a little trickle of water running and then I'm peeling the hard boiled Eggs. Get them out there for the baby, let them cool. And then I love to use a hard boiled egg slicer. This is like a $2 kitchen tool you can buy on Amazon. I'll put one in the episode description. If you've never seen an egg slicer, they're literally amazing because they cut it into slices that your baby can then pick up and feed to themselves with their own hands. That's baby-led weaning in action. It works great with hard boiled Eggs.
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Katie Ferraro (12m 31s):
The number three way I like to make Eggs for Babies is a microwave steamed egg. Now this is a recipe that one of my interns made up because we're talking about different ways to make Eggs for babies and she had to do like a section for one of her nutrition classes on microwave cookery, which I love because I'm currently staying at my friend's house and she does not have a microwave. I'm like, how do you live without a microwave? And she's like, I can live without a microwave and you totally can live without a microwave, but if you have one, it's a really easy way to make Eggs. So we have a great recipe in My program, baby-led weaning with Katie Ferraro. We have this 100 First Foods content library. So if you go to the Allergenic Foods and you go to egg, there's tons of different recipes for your baby's age and stage. So even if your baby's only in phase one, that's the first eight weeks of baby-led weaning.
Katie Ferraro (13m 11s):
We have lots of ways that you can make egg for your baby. 'cause some of the ways I'm sharing today, you can't actually do it until your baby is in phase two or phase three, meaning they're a little bit of an older eater. You've been at this for longer than eight weeks and your baby has their pen or grasp. Okay? If you want to check out that program to get all these recipes and the videos and the instructions as well as my 100 First Foods Daily Meal Plan that walks you through exactly which food to feed on which day, it's 20 weeks of done for you meal plans, that's all linked up inside of the program. If you go to baby-led weaning dot co slash program, you can join today. But as from the microwave steamed egg recipe, you take one egg, a quarter cup of no salt broth, mix it up, put it in a bowl, cover the bowl with a paper towel and you like put the paper towel over and then underneath the bowl so it kind of makes this lid that you're gonna steam inside of it.
Katie Ferraro (13m 57s):
Cook it for two minutes. When it's done, you cool the egg And it cut it into strips about the size of your adult pinky finger and it's kind of like the equivalent of a sous V egg. We're gonna talk about sovi in a second, but if you don't have a sous V machine, which a lot of people don't, a microwave cooking is really, really an easy way to get a cool texture egg for your baby. The fourth way that I like to do Eggs for Baby is a steamed oven egg cups recipe. This is again, another recipe from our program, but I'll kind of explain it really briefly. You basically take muffin tins or mini loaf pan. I love cooking baby-led weaning foods in a mini loaf pan because they make these cool rectangular shaped product that you can then cut in two pieces about the size of your adult pinky finger. I love the steamed egg cups recipe 'cause again, I like to cook in bulk and you can do 12 Eggs at a time and then you can freeze or refrigerate these so you can use them for like breakfast on the go or stuff that's already made.
Katie Ferraro (14m 46s):
So you don't have to be like making Eggs every morning for your baby. And just as a side note, you don't wanna offer anyone food to your baby every day. Some families like discover Eggs and the babies love Eggs and they're like, oh, we do Eggs every day. You do wanna be reintroducing familiar foods on a regular basis, but you don't have to do that food every single day. You wanna free up room for your baby to continue trying that one new food a day. That's part of our program and that five step feeding framework is we get your baby to try a new food every day. But we also have meal plans where we're reincorporating the familiar foods from previous days. So with the steamed oven egg cups recipe, You do the mini loaf pans over a pan of boiling water. So I do like a dozen at a time. You bake it at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 to 25 minutes.
Katie Ferraro (15m 29s):
You end up with the texture of Eggs like steamed Eggs. It's kind of like the microwave. It's kind of like the sous V. If you've ever been to Starbucks and had the egg bites, I love those, but I'm not gonna pay that much for them every day. You can literally just make them at home. Number five is the sous v egg bites recipe. So for those of you that have a sous V machine, actually did a whole episode with a sous V expert who has a company that makes sous V meats because sous vide is basically cooking in a water bath. I love sous V cooking because you can never overdo the food. So like you can make perfect pork chops, you can make perfect salmon, but it works amazing for egg cups as well. So we worked on this recipe pretty hard inside of the program.
Katie Ferraro (16m 10s):
Not a lot of families have a sovi machine, but some do. It's basically like this heating element device that you affix to the side of a big pot of water and you bring the water up to a certain temperature. So it takes sometimes up to an hour to get the water to the temperature that you want, but then it stays at that temperature indefinitely, which I love. Then you can put, we do the egg cups in mason jars And it you basically are ending up with the exact same product as you would get at Starbucks, those Starbucks. So v egg bites, you can make them at home if you have the Sovi machine. I remember the first time my husband brought home the Sovi machine and I was like, what is this thing? I do not need another kitchen appliance. Like get this outta my house. Then he made a couple things in it and we got a cookbook for Sovi and I was like, oh my gosh, you couldn't stop me from like Soo eating everything for a while there.
Katie Ferraro (16m 54s):
But it really, really does work wonders for baby-led weaning too. So we have a whole sovi recipe section of inside of the program If you want to check it out. If that's not for you, you can skip that step 'cause there's lots of other ways to make Eggs for your baby. Number six is the baked egg cup recipes. I love to bake egg cups. I love, like we have a zucchini egg cup recipe. It's a great way to incorporate the vegetable zucchini, especially at breakfast time. We have a savory asparagus egg muffin recipe inside of the program. We generally do not do combination or multi textured foods for babies in phase one of baby-led weaning. We start all of the combination multi textured foods beginning in phase two of baby-led weaning. So that's when your baby's been eating for at least eight weeks.
Katie Ferraro (17m 36s):
They've handled the single individual textures without problem. For the families that are in our 100 FIRST FOODS Daily Meal Plan, we're working you through those single isolated foods for the first 40 days of baby-led weaning. And then we move into phase two and that's when when you start doing some of these combination foods. And then finally number seven is scrambled Eggs. Of course, scrambled Eggs is gonna be on the list, but scrambled Eggs do not work well for early eaters. That's because a lot of people, when they make their scrambled Eggs, they kind of chop 'em up so small that they become these small pieces that your baby cannot pick up and feed to themselves. Because remember when your baby is starting solid foods, they don't yet have their pinch or grasp, meaning they can't use their thumb in their forefinger to pick up those small pieces of food. But as your baby gets more proficient with self-feeding and after they develop their pinch or grasp, which usually happens around nine or 10 months of age, then offering a scrambled egg is a much easier way for your baby to pick that food up and feed it to themselves.
Katie Ferraro (18m 28s):
So as a summary, the seven ways to do Eggs, fried egg strips, hardboiled Eggs, microwave, steamed egg steamed oven, an egg cups recipe, soused egg bites recipe, baked egg cups, and then scrambled Eggs. We have tons and tons of egg-based recipes inside of the program. baby-led weaning with Katie Ferraro. One of my favorite ones is the cottage cheese and egg casserole recipe. I am a sucker for foods that you can make ahead, refrigerate and freeze the extras. You use 'em as leftovers on the regular. Plus your baby's gonna love all of these different textures that they get to try out. Also, if you're inside of the program, check out the quinoa crust quiche recipe. We've got the spaghetti squash egg nest recipe. We've got zucchini egg cups, the savory asparagus egg muffin recipe.
Katie Ferraro (19m 12s):
No shortage of ways for you to help your baby safely try Eggs and then keep reintroducing them to that egg protein. Again, you can sign up for the program baby-led me with Katie Ferraro to get all of these recipes, plus the instructions and the videos. There's over 300 recipes in the program as well as my 100 First Foods Daily Meal Plan. If you wanna follow that, it's all linked up at baby-led Weaning dot co slash program. So in closing, I wanna share one of my favorite things about after you've tried egg a bunch of different ways for your baby and You know your baby's not allergic to egg. When you've got egg on your familiar foods list, meaning you've passed it, You know your baby's not allergic to it, then you can start offering your baby fritters.
Katie Ferraro (19m 52s):
And we generally do fritters, which are again, a combination or multi textured food. We do that starting in phase two. So after about eight weeks of having started solid foods, then your baby moves on to these foods you fritters will become your best friend, especially for the whole grains because there's a lot of wacky whole grains on the 100 FIRST FOODS list and a lot of families are like, I'm not really sure how to prepare these. So for each one of the whole grains on the 100 First Foods list, we have corresponding fritter recipes. So fritters are when you take the dried cooked grain product and you combine it with egg and some other seasonings and you make it into little patties and you fry it and then you cool it, you cut it into pieces about the size of your adult pinky finger. It's a wonderful way to make really easy finger foods for your baby. If you wanna learn more about fritters, go listen to episode 1 43.
Katie Ferraro (20m 35s):
That was part of the baby-led Weaning Basic series, How to Make Fritters for Self Feeding Babies. If you don't yet have a copy of that 100 First Foods list with all the allergenic foods and all the starches, the vegetables, the proteins, the fruits I give everybody on my free online workshop called baby-led Weaning for Beginners, they all get a copy of my original 100 FIRST FOODS list. So if you haven't taken that free workshop, baby-led Weaning for Beginners, you can sign up at baby-led weaning do co slash program. It's about a one hour video training. Do lots of visuals on how to make the food safe for baby-led weaning, because that's definitely my area of expertise, is showing families how to make these foods safe for their baby to eat at whatever age and stage of starting solid foods your baby's at.
Katie Ferraro (21m 18s):
Sign up for that workshop, baby-led weaning dot co slash workshop, or if you're ready to get started, making all the foods for your baby, the programs at baby-led weaning dot co slash program. I'll put all of the links from today's episode on the show notes, which you can find at blwpodcast.com/49, and a special thank you to our partners at AirWave Media. If you like podcasts that feature food and science and using your brain, check out some of the podcasts from AirWave or online at blwpodcast.com. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.
Mindful Mama Podcast (21m 57s):
What do You do when your toddler melts down or your teen shuts down? I want to introduce you to the Mindful Mama Podcast. I'm Hunter Clark Fields's, author of Raising Good Humans and your host. For the past 10 years, I used to be a yelling overwhelmed mom until I found mindfulness and practical parenting tools that changed everything. Each week I bring you honest conversations and expert advice to help you regulate your emotions, manage your kids' behavior with compassion, and break the cycle of reactive parenting. Whether you're raising toddlers or teens, you'll find real strategies for conscious parenting. Screen time A DHD and more. Listen to the Mindful Mama Podcast wherever you get your podcasts because you can raise kind, confident kids without losing your cool.

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