Food exams

October 19, 2017

Function of sugar in cakes

Sugar used in cooking comes from either sugar cane or sugar beet

Use Food Science You Can Eat to help


Intrinsic sugars are contained within the cell structure of foods such as fruit and vegetables.
Extrinsic sugars are sugars added to a product during preparation such as caster sugar added to make cakes.
The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition recommended that free sugar should be no more than 5%
of daily energy.
Definition of free sugars – those sugars added by manufacturers and cooks plus sugars from
honey, syrups and unsweetened fruit juices.

Functional properties of sugar (sucrose)
• Provides sweetness to products.
• Dissolves and made into a syrup.
• When heated will caramelise and provide golden brown colour to the product.
Combines with yeast will speed the fermentation process.
• Helps aerate a mixture during the creaming method when combined with fat.
• Acts a preservative in jam.
• Keeps the product moist.

“Sugar gives us that delicious texture and crumb, the lovely golden brown colour and it prolongs how long we can store our bakes”
“Sugar also keeps baked goods moist so sugar-free versions may need to be wrapped in cling film before storage to prevent drying out.” Good Food’s Nutritional Therapist Kerry Torrens

Health risks of too much sugar in your diet
• Tooth decay, Obesity, Type 2 diabetes.
Ways of lowering the sugar content in dishes
• In most baked recipes you can reduce the sugar content by up to 30% but test the recipe!
• You can use artificial sweeteners which often provide no calories. They are sweeter than sugar but some lose their sweetness when heated so the cake will collapse.
• If using fruit that has edible skin such as apples, remove the skin as it is has a sharp flavour and needs extra sugar to make it more edible.
• Use dried fruit in a cake mix. Fruits such as raisins, apricots or figs are high in natural sugar.

Working characteristics – how the ingredient behaves, its performance or how it is used to its best advantage, when in a recipe cooked on its own, or as an accompaniment.
Functional properties  – the purpose for which the ingredient is being used and can be linked to its: structure, nutritional value, taste, texture, appearance, shelf life.

These are exam board definitions – I think they mean the same!!!

Sugar substitutes  – alternative ingredients Xylitol

Sugar explained

Stevia Agave 

Sugar free baking   – blog with information on sugar

October 11, 2017

Food Preparation Task

For the Food Preparation Task you need to Cost a recipe, use the Method for your practical and analyse and Evaluate your results.  Food Preparation book ready soon.

These screens have come from Nutrition Program.ipadlasagnecostipadlasagnerecipesheetipadlasagnestar

September 26, 2017

Egg whites and foams for meringues NEA 1

Liquid egg white used for meringue tests to discover what ingredients can be added

I’ve been doing more egg experiments this time with egg whites.

Have been using Liquid Egg white to save wasting so many eggs as there have been lots of tests to do.

The advantage of using Liquid Egg is that I can measure the egg white to use to experiment. My egg whites from eggs measured different amounts in millilitres so I had to beat some together then measure the same amount for experiments.

Use my book Food Science You Can Eat for more help

Love Food Love Science have an excellent website showing egg white foam experiments and the science behind egg white foam formation.

Protein foam formation shows how additives affect the stability of egg white foams.

The age of an egg affects its foaming ability and you can see the IFST.org tests here.

Egg white and cream of tartar whisk really well but egg yolk is flat

What whisk to use? I found that electric whisks were best to get a fair test for experiments as you can time the whisking time and level of whisking.

You can find the tests for gluten and bread, gluten and pasta and egg whites in our resource Food Investigations NEA 1 available August 2024

Use an electric whisk for a fair test
Meringue recipe testing

I used The Nutrition Program to present the results of the tasting. This is how it is done.

Click My Recipes and name one as Mini meringue test

Put in the basic meringue recipe in Ingredients.

I’m testing to see what happens when I add oil, vinegar and cream of tartar to egg whites.

Go to Star Profile.

For each Taster put in oil, vinegar and cream of tartar.

Then think of Descriptors for sensory appraisal – your tasting work.

I’ve chosen crisp, sweet, chewy, light foamy

Then tasted the meringues and given each a mark out of 5 where 0= not and 5= very.

This is a new function added for NEA 1 test – Click Hide Rating.

I can now see the Star Profile with each meringue tasted.

Then I can write my Evaluations.

Then Download as JPG.

Full marks I hope!!

NEA 1 Food Investigations 10 Tasks
Make a star profile to show meringue tasting results
Evaluation of meringues in star profile
September 26, 2017

3 New NEA 1 Tasks

We’ve trialled and tested 3 more Tasks for NEA 1 for download and Powerpoint.

They are gluten in bread, gluten in pasta and egg white foams and meringues.

Here are some classroom challenges that I found!

  1. Washing gluten out of a flour dough takes ages and it is easy to wash bits down the sink by mistake. My tip – use 150g flour for the dough so you have enough dough to work with and wrap it in muslin.
  2. Make small loaves of bread so that they can be kneaded, proved and baked in a short time – the problem is to make the loaves all at the same time in the same way – I couldn’t do it.

  1. I don’t know how to test gluten in pasta – I made it by rolling out by hand and then by machine which was very fiddly. Then cut it into 1 cm noodles and cooked it for 2 minutes. But how can you test and compare the pasta flours? I’ve put this in my Evaluation of the Task.
  2. Egg white foams are very difficult to measure so I decided not to do this for the Task. I tested different sugars on a basic recipe and cooked a control which had no sugar at all. Then I added other ingredients and got an amazing result with cream of tartar which gave huge volume.

  1. I highly recommend Harold McGee’s Book On Food and Cooking to support all the food science questions I needed answered.

April 15, 2017

AQA Food Prep worksheets for the Nutrition Program

We’ve matched statements from the specification for AQA Food Preparation and Nutrition GCSE with worksheets using the Nutrition Program.

Download for free on this link.

AQA and Nutrition Program