Poha is soft, quick-cooking flattened rice, and we can start her on it at six months, rinsed and cooked into the soft, well-mashed first food the IAP asks for. It is already on the family's breakfast table, and her bowl simply grows with her, from that first smooth mash to a softer share of the family plate.
How to serve
Soft mashed poha6+ months
Thin poha is the one to start with, since it soaks fast and mashes easily. Rinse the flakes well and cook them soft in a little water, then mash them down smooth and loosen the mash with her usual breastmilk, formula or plain water. You want it thick enough to cling to the spoon rather than run off when you tilt it.
A couple of spoonfuls is plenty for the first few times, and you get to see how it suits her. From around her seventh month the mash can sit thicker, close to a thick porridge, still smooth with nothing papery left in it.
Keep it plain: no added salt while she is little, no sugar or jaggery until she is two, and no honey before her first birthday, for the botulism risk honey carries for a baby. A little ghee stirred through makes a small bowl go further for her.
Soft flakes, poha balls9-12 months
Lumpy and granular food matters at this age, so we can leave the perfectly smooth mash of the early months behind. The same poha can now come as it is, cooked soft and moist with the flakes left whole, and small, very soft pieces of vegetable cooked in for her to practise chewing on. If whole flakes are still hard going, mash it lightly for a few weeks more.
Cooked a little fluffier, it becomes something she can manage herself. Many of us press the soft cooked poha into little balls she can hold, or simply let her pick up the soft flakes with her fingers while you spoon the rest. Let her appetite decide how much goes in.
Poha is a rice food. Cooked rice left sitting out can grow germs, and warming it again does not make it safe, so her poha is best cooked fresh and finished the same day rather than a morning batch rewarmed at night. Her share still needs no added salt.
Softer family-style poha12+ months
From about a year she eats what the family eats, and poha is a family dish long before it is a baby one. Her bowl comes out of the same pot as everyone else's, vegetables and all, softened a little more for her and left with more texture than her earlier mash. You mash it only where she still needs it. She picks the soft flakes up herself now, the way she began doing a few months back.
If the family's poha has whole peanuts in it, pick them out of her share; a whole peanut can still choke her at this age. Keep her portion light on salt, and still nothing sweet until she is two.
Poha is a year-round food, monsoon and winter included. It does not give her a cough or a cold.
Why?
Many of us grew up hearing that poha is 'cooling', best kept away in the rains or after the afternoon. A cold comes from the people around her, not from a bowl of soft poha, and this is a food Indian kitchens make in every season. If it settles minds at home, give it earlier in the day, warm and freshly cooked, with a little ghee stirred in.
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