With my 7 month old daughter on three solid meals a day, I continue to make batches of homemade food for her and freeze them in batches. I like to follow many of the recipes in the Annabel Karmel and Lorraine Kelly weaning books but as I am making more meals for my daughter rather than purees I need to use stock in some of the recipes. Some of the books suggest making your own stock from scratch but to be honest, with a baby, I really don't have the time or inclination to do so. So, I began looking around for a low salt stock that I could use for making my baby's meals. My first try were the Heinz baby vegetable stock cubes which were low salt but lacked any taste whatsoever. My sister then suggested the Boots version which I then picked up a couple of weeks ago.

These Boots Baby Organic Stock CUbes cost £1.55 for a pack of 6. I purchased the vegetable version of these stock cubes. On the front of the pack, it states that these stock cubes are suitable across all three stages of weaning, evening from the early stages when you are maybe starting to make meals rather than just purees all the time. These stock cubes also contain no artificial colours or flavours, are gluten free, organic, and have a controlled stock levels. They are also suitable for vegetarian diets as well.

It was the salt content that was what concerned me the most about general stock cubes, however, stock made from one of these cubes only contains 0.03g of salt, which I think is reasonable. You could also reduce this salt more as you can cut a cube to make up smaller portions for baby meals.

These stock cubes are individually wrapped in foil and do resemble a normal vegetable stock cube in colour and in consistency. In fact, I doubt you would notice any difference between the two when making up stock. As I mentioned I had previously tried the Heinze baby vegetable stock cubes and really thought they tasted bland in the food. I had used them to make vegetable soup that would be suitable for my husband, myself and my daughter, and there was a huge difference in taste in comparison to using a normal salt cube. The soup tasted much much blander, and although my daughter ate the soup well, I was keeping a look out for something that would suit us all as as family that had some taste without al the added salt.

The great thing about these stock cubes is that they actually do offer more flavour - not as much as a normal stock cube, but them given you have reduced salt that is hardly surprising, however there still is a flavour with them which is what I want. I have now used almost all of the cubes in this pack, making soup, casseroles etc for my daughter, and all of them have avoided that blandness that the Heinz stock cubes had.

I will continue to purchase these as I can be confident that my daughter is getting good tasty meals without the high salt content that I normal stock cube contains.