My list of essential equipment for investigations – things I have used for my experiments for NEA 1 Food Investigations 10 Tasks. This book will be available online to purchase soon. (mid Sept 2023)
Digital scales – you need accurate measurements for testing recipes
Digital scales
Food probe– use to test setting temperatures of egg mixtures, sauce thickening temperatures and cooking temperature.
Nutrition Program! – use to find the nutritional value of flours, sugars, beans, … to help you make choices for foods to investigate.
Digital camera – use your phone
Use phone to capture images
measuring cylinder
NEA 1 Food Investigations 10 Tasks.
This book will be available online to purchase soon. (mid Sept 2023)
For NEA 1 you need to evaluate and annotate your results. Here’s how to do it using the Nutrition Program.
The Task – To discover what happens if you reduce the sugar in a sponge cake recipe.
We made cakes with full amount of 60g sugar and then did a batch with 50g, 40g, 30g.
You can evaluate the Functional properties of sugar in cakes – the purpose for which the ingredient is being used and can be linked to – its structure, nutritional value, taste, texture, appearance, shelf life.
Star profile from Nutrition Program to show evaluation of results of reducing sugar in cakes.
How to do this
Create a recipe for your sponge cake in My Recipes.
Bake and compare your cakes and then click Star Profile
Name the recipe ‘Star profile sponge cakes’.
Choose descriptors – how the cake should look and taste. The descriptors we chose were – golden, yellow sponge, open texture, moist, dry.
The Control cake was marked golden (5), yellow sponge (4), open texture (4), moist (4), dry (1) – this was our perfect cake.
Taste the cakes and mark them on the chart – tip in the +Add Taster put the name of the cake – for example, full sugar, 50g sugar.
The Nutrition Program Star Profile fills in – now you need to Evaluate the results under Evaluation – see our chart.
To get extra exam marks you can annotate the Star profile.
This shows an example of annotating a Star Profile to show what the results mean.
Task
Compare the nutrition of sweeteners for cakes and desserts – use for experiments changing the types of sweetener used in cakes and desserts.
We are told to reduce the amount of ‘free sugars’ in our food, especially cakes and desserts.
But how easy is this to do and how much sugar is found in ingredients used for sweetening?
Compare the sugar content of different ingredients
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.
Here’s how you can use the Nutrition Program for GCSE Food Preparation and Nutrition NEA 1
Assessment 1: The Food Investigation Assessment 15% of total qualification
Task A Example: Shortcrust pastry should be crisp to the bite and crumbly in the mouth. It can be prepared using a range of different ingredients. Investigate the working characteristics and the functional and chemical properties where appropriate, of the different ingredients needed to achieve a perfect shortcrust pastry.
Choose fats for pastries – for example, Trex, butter, lard and margarine, lard on its own.
Think of 5 words to describe pastry – crumbly, short, buttery, light, tough.
Make and taste the pastries and put the results on My Recipes, Star Profile.
The Tasting words are listed as descriptors on the left side.
Then carry out several tastings and get marks out of 5.
The Nutrition Program creates the star as you can see below. You can then write the Evaluations of the different pastries as shown below and download your work.
The Nutrition Program Blog 