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
Ten Tasks explore how to carry out Research, Investigation, Analysis and Evaluation for each Task for all exam boards.
Tasks – thickening sauces, raising agents, fats in pastry, flours in pastry, bread, pasta, cakes, changing sugars in cakes, eggs for setting and foams
All linked to science.
Shortcrust pastry changing the fats
NEA1 Ridgwell Press
Great resource!“I have used this to teach my students about Food Science. The book is very easy to follow and the experiments very accessible to students, it ideal for my GCSE classes.”
Make a star profile to compare resultsStar profile
For this investigation I tested lots of flours including Pasta Flour called 00.
First I made some gluten balls by mixing 150g flour with water to make a dough then washing out the starch.
Flours make different sized gluten balls which are then baked.
Next to make the pasta which can be done by mixing the dough – egg is best – then either rolling by hand or using a pasta machine. Make up 3-4 pastas with different flour and taste test them to compare results. I cut the pasta into 1 cm noodles and boiled for 2 minutes. Same test for each – fair testing.
The Nutrition Program Blog 