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