When my mother-in-law came to visit, she carted along a gift from Nil’s godmother, a very lovely lady currently living in Paris with her hubby, dog and children plus a boatload of sewing. She had earlier given us a baby foods recipe and this tool is the accompaniment to that book. I must remember to send her a little gift for this lovely tool because since we started Eva on solids, we have used this each and every time we make fruit and vegetable purees! It’s just godsent – easy, quick and best of all, very convenient!

The BEABA Babycook comes with a basket, a ladle of some sorts, a cover for blitzing and a lid together with two functions – steam and puree. The instructions are easy – fill in the steaming section with some water (you can use the processor “bin” to measure), drop in the items (diced up please) that you wish to steam into the BPA-free basket (in fact, all plastic units in this equipment are BPA-free), cover with the lid, turn the dial to “steam” function and let it cook. How long depends on how much water you put in and after it’s done, it stops automatically. You then remove the basket with the ladle (careful coz it’s steaming hot), either pour it into the bin with the juices that have collected from the steaming or discard the water (recommended for spinach and carrots coz of nitrate content) and puree!

Once done, the puree can be stored into ice cubes or baby cubes for freezing OR refrigerate if you plan to consume within the day. You can even use the Babycook for reheating – it takes in 1 measurement of water (on the bin) which is about 5 minutes. The recommendation is that you use glass jars for reheating and not plastic.

So far, I’ve tried making the following purees with it and every time, I get lovely ultra smooth puree especially when I choose to use the juice collected from the steaming process:

• Peach
• Pumpkin
• Sweet potato
• Mango
• Papaya
• Plum
• Broccoli
• Spinach

Definitely a recommended tool for the kitchen as you can use it to make adult-type soups as well but of course not in gigantic portions!

The only problem with this is that it’s quite pricey – about $280 plus – and available only at a few places. So far, I heard that Motherworks (Singapore) has this item in stock. Luckily there is a Singaporean BEABA distributor so it means that I have someone to go to if I did to repair or replace anything.

Pros
BPA-free
Easy to use
Quick cooking so great for busy mums
No need to keep an eye on the cooking (auto-shut off function)
Pulse puree mode = control over how you want the texture to be (lumpy or smooth)

Cons
Pricey

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 9:29 am and is filed under Reviews, Weaning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.