When we started trialing quinoa, I got very excited. I knew that quinoa would offer a lot of variety in Zac’s diet (and, eventually, mine), and to start with I wanted to make him his very first teething cracker.
I had seen a few recipes for homemade teething biscuits before, but when it came time to make this I just “winged it”, so I don’t know how much this will resemble other teething cracker recipes out there. All I know is that it worked, and Zac LOVED it! (By the way, I have heard of teething biscuits and teething crackers – anyone know what the difference is? I’m using the terms interchangeably!)
It’s so simple, too!
We started Zac’s quinoa trial with cooked quinoa flakes. I followed the directions on the box and wound up with 1 cup of cooked quinoa. His trial only used 1 tsp. of quinoa for the first day, so that was a lot of quinoa shoved in the fridge!
Cooked quinoa flakes are very moist, of course, so I added quinoa flour to help turn it into a dough.
That wasn’t quite enough to get the consistency right, so I added some uncooked quinoa flakes and mixed it together and voila! A dough!
Making a dough
I rolled it out somewhere between 1/8th and 1/4th of an inch thick on a sheet of parchment paper. It was really sticky, so I actually used a sheet of parchment paper on top, too. That kept things nice and neat!
Rolled dough
After it was in a nice, flat piece, I cut it into small rectangular shapes with a pizza cutter.
Then, just to be tidy, I pulled away all the odd shaped pieces and re-rolled and re-cut them until I had mostly neat little rectangles to cook.
Nifty rectangles
At the time, I was making a pot roast, which is cooked at 300 degrees. Since I don’t have a nifty double oven, I just threw the crackers in at the same temperature, hoping it would work. Turns out, some time between 45-60 minutes at a low temperature made them PERFECT.
I let them cool on a cooling rack for a few minutes, then took the whole sheet of parchment paper off the cookie sheet and let them cool the rest of the way.
Thanks to pre-cutting them, they snapped apart into cute little rectangular crackers just the right size for Zac’s little mouth!
Yummy teething biscuit/crackers!
Jed even started snagging them off the counter, asking for “More crackers, peese, Mommy!” Darrel tried them and said they were a really good cracker; he remarked that they didn’t even have any of the aftertaste that quinoa items can sometimes have.
So this is a definite winner in my house! I hope it works well in yours, too!
(And I really hope Zac can handle quinoa when we reintroduce it later on…he LOVED these crackers!!)
- 1 c. cooked quinoa flakes
- ⅔ c. quinoa flour
- ½ c. uncooked quinoa flakes
- Preheat oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Cook a batch of quinoa flakes per package instructions. (Mine suggests ⅓ c. flakes and 1 c. water.)
- Portion out 1 c. of the cooked quinoa flakes in a bowl.
- Add the quinoa flour and uncooked quinoa flakes to the cooked quinoa flakes in the bowl and mix together completely.
- Lay dough on a sheet of parchment paper; lay another sheet of parchment paper on top and roll the dough out to a thickness between ⅛th and ¼th of an inch.
- Using a pizza cutter, cut the dough into whatever shapes and sizes you would like.
- Slide the sheet of parchment paper on to a cookie sheet, remove the top sheet of parchment paper.
- Place in the oven and cook for 45-60 minutes, depending on how brown and crispy you would like them.
- Hand your baby a healthy, wholesome teething cracker to gnaw!
Do you have a great, allergy-friendly teething cracker recipe? Please share your tips!
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This post shared with:
Healing With Food Fridays, Thank Your Body Thursday and Real Food Wednesdays.
What brand of quinoa flour do you use?
Ancient Harvest Brand. I have a friend who buys their whole quinoa and grinds the flour herself; she insists it has no bitter aftertaste that way. I haven’t tried that, yet, but I will. I find it on Amazon.com. 🙂
Thanks for the info. I was hoping there might be a brand that double bakes so I don’t have to. I tried milling my own flour this weekend for quinoa bread. A lot of work but my FPIES boy had his first taste of a baked good so it was worth it.
There may be a brand that double bakes, but I called Ancient Harvest to ask about manufacturing practices and they ONLY run quinoa in the building their quinoa products are produced in. Their line with corn is run in a separate building, so, NO cross contamination. I haven’t investigated other brands so I can’t recommend any of them.
It’s amazing the lengths we’ll go to for our kids to be able to eat something semi-“normal”, isn’t it? LOL Glad your son finally got a baked good! Rock on, Mama!
Thanks so much for linking up at Healing With Food Friday! If only all children had such wonderful homemade teething biscuits…what a gift to their health that would be!
My pleasure! I know – I’m horrified by the ingredients I see in baby food these days. Ugh! It’s always better to make your own. See you next week!
Any tips to modify this to include coconut, blueberries, and/or peaches? I am not very creative with these limited ingredients 😉
Hmm…well, I’d imagine you could use coconut milk or a peach puree to cook the quinoa flakes. You could possibly add some peach puree to the mix and just increase the quantity of uncooked quinoa flakes to balance out the additional liquid. Those would be my first steps to try, but I haven’t done them so I’m not 100% they’ll work well.
Now, the quinoa nuggets would be pretty easy to add things to!
Once the quinoa is pureed, you could hand mix in some blueberries. You could add about 1/2 cup of peaches and puree that with the quinoa before rolling it out. You could take the finished balls and roll them in coconut before baking. I’m pretty confident any of those would work very well with the nugget recipe!
If you try any of these, would you let me know what you did and how it worked out? I hope we’ll get a fruit this summer in Zac’s diet and would love to hear your results! 🙂 Good luck!
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What beginning age do you think these are appropriate for? My FPIES son is 9 months and has not had any finger food yet. Quinoa is his first pass of a “grain”/flour/cereal so I am excited to see what I can do.
Hi Laura! I’d imagine the age any typical teething cracker is recommended for…9-12 months? I’m not sure. I know if you bake these crisp enough, they’re really hard and not likely to crumble in your sons mouth. He’ll have to gnaw for a while to get any quinoa, so, for me, it wasn’t a terribly high choking risk. It all depends on how crispy you bake the crackers, though.
I didn’t get a chance to use these on Zac until he was much older, but I would have willingly let him chew away on them when he was 9 months old. He had several teeth already by then, though. Hope that helps!
And YAY for your first grain pass!! Quinoa is excellent! 🙂
I just made some and he loves them! I added 2 scoops of formula for a pleasanter taste and I cooked for less (25 min) so they were softer like a cookie. Thanks so much! It’s a whole new world!
Yay, Laura! What a great tweak! I’m so happy they worked great and he loved them. 🙂
Q: I’m puzzled that there seems to be no liquid added to the dry ingredients?
Well, the cooked quinoa flakes are very moist, as those are cooked with quinoa flakes and water (similar to oatmeal). So that’s where the moisture comes from in the recipe.
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could you use ground steel cut oat as flour instead of the quinoa flour?
If oats are safe, I don’t see why not. In fact, you could probably sub oats for all of the ingredients in this if you wanted. Let me know if you try it, and how it turns out!
How do you store them?
Hi Debbie! We just put them in a Ziploc bag or Ball canning jar. He always eats them so fast, there’s no need to figure out long-term storage! I’d imagine these would keep for about a week on the counter in a jar or bag, though.
Hmmm I wonder how these would taste with some banana pureed and added. Wheels spinning!
If you do it, please let me know how it turns out!