sigh, food tech lessons

[dingit]

Sent ds in with ingredients for fruit cake. He's brought home a cake that is almost raw! What exactly are they teaching them? You would think the teacher would help them to check food is cooked properly.
The foxes will be stuffed full tonight.

The only two food tech classes I remember were making a toasty and making an ice cream Sunday. And another when the teacher smacked a boys bum

I only left school in 2008 so wasn't that long ago!

I have been in sooooo many food lessons (secondary) where the teacher has given clear instructions, handed out recipes and given time prompts, and still the kids have arsed it up. Because they were not listening and messing about.

Gileswithachainsaw

"what on earth goes on in the lesson that recipes that work everywhere else suddenly don't at school?"

Its not 1-2-1 with a parent, the pupils don't listen, follow instructions or get organised.

A recipe that takes 30 minutes (including prep) at home can (and does) take over an hour at a school.

Pizza toast is a prime example,
slice of bread
A form of tomato sauce
Selected veg
Possibly sliced meat
Cheese

at home 10 - 25 minutes

at school up to an hour (sometimes over)

But we all managed it

even if the teacher left the room.

edible and tasty food produced all round.

At food tech at ours it was always fecking scones.

Fruit scones, cheese scones and design your own scones.

You'd have thought my man would have learnt to have all the ingredients in on when on a Sunday afternoon I'd gaily inform her that I needed XYZ for food tech tomorrow.

I still remember the look of delight when I presented my mother with my perfectly cooked cheese and anchovy scones...

*mam

I don't recall being taught anything useful like how to thicken a sauce or make gravy. It was scones.

We did pizza once - with a scone base.

I was a disaster in my HE lessons at school. Still hate cooking.
My fish pie was raw. Nobody could even cut the rock cakes. The one time I thought it was going well was cheese souffle and it rose so much it rose through the shelf above and stuck to the roof of the oven. The teacher was not impressed at the mess it made....
.... Almost as much mess as when we made spicy carrot and coriander soup and I forgot to put the lid on the blender.

Now dd's in year 8 we actually have some edible fare making it home. In year 7 her teacher was dreadful and the food inedible. Dd would follow the recipe but do things the way she's been shown at home, teacher would contradict her and a bit of a clash would ensue. She was very rigid.
This year's teacher is more accommodating to Dd being a vegetarian ands happy for her to tweak recipes to our tastes. She agrees that it's pointless creating food that no-one will eat.

We still have to master Dd telling me more than 12 hrs in advance what ingredients she needs though.

I'm just impressed that they actually made a real cake!

My food tech days were; make a sandwich, put topping on a prebought pizza base and made some spring rolls using ready to roll filo pastry. Oh and once we got the shear joy of boiling rice. We had 2hr lessons!!! We had to spend 2 weeks planning (4hrs!!), 1 week making and 2weeks evaluating. It was nuts

Oh and I'm 25 so that's like 13yrs back. I really wish they'd taught me basics like how to make your own pasta sauce, make gravy, what sauté meant, how to make basic meals like chilli and spag bol. Not only would it have meant I actually learnt things, it would have been a lot more use and helped with a healthier lifestyle.

My issue with the lessons are that kids are being put off cooking.

They cook a meal at school, bring it home and even they think it's tastes rubbish.

It makes them feel it's not worth the effort of cooking at home. My dh is a chef, so he has gone through the methods and shown dd why it's wrong and then cooked the meals at home with her again. So she can see that cooking your own food is worth the time.

But if kids don't have that at home, I can see how they thing cooking yourself is pointless. Takes time and tastes shit.

Dodgy oven??

This thread has brought back traumatic memories of my own food tech classes...

There was the time we were making bread rolls and the teacher told us not to knead the dough too much because we'd knock out all the air and they wouldn't rise.

My mum had left home when I was 13 so all the cooking at home was down to me anyway, but the bloody patronising teachers wouldn't acknowledge that I was perfectly capable of making a pasta bake. Apparently it was "too adventurous"

Ds has just chosen this option
I told her she will need to be more responsible about prepping ingredients and not tell me at 10pm that she "has cooking tomorrow" 😳
I don't hold out much hope tho.

In order for you to reproduce the effect of a food tec lesson at home you should do the following:
Get a rleven year old to invite two or perhaps three of their friends around to make fairy cakes, don't buy any extra equipment though that would be cheating !
Don't worry about lack of space..there's non at school either.
they all have to bring their own ingredients, which you will give them a list for, written out at least a week before, preferably when they are quite distracted..no cheating..empty your cupboards if necessary. Try to get at least one of them to come in with only half the ingredients and stamp thoroughly on all their bags before allowing them to unpack.
Have a fixed start time, they can't turn up early though ! ( allow them an hour start to finish ) and start then, irrespective of whether they are there.
For authenticity i suggest you get them to roll about on a muddy
field before turning up, preferably in football kit.
During that hour you are not allowed to offer more than two minutes supervision per child, total..and you must have photographed evaluated and discussed the result with each child, and given written feedback for improvement for next time again from that two minute allowance.
Go into another room to drink gin if possible ...its less painful that way.

At the end of the hour you need to have another three children turning up to do the same task. So whatever state your kitchens in is what you use.

Repeat five times in a row.....

I think it's a miracle they if they come home with anything that even resembles food..never mind being edible.

Food tec teachers of the UK... I salute you

That sounds dreadful, TheBeast!
I know I was "spoilt" with home ec, being a private school we were at, but we all had to do it at once, 2 to an oven/work station and I think we had a triple period (3 x 40 minutes, so 2 hours) to do it all. We did get taught some basics (but I am talking 30+ years ago ) - egg custard, blancmange, flapjacks, puff pastry on a cheese and something or other pie (we were told to bring in frozen puff pastry though, making it ourselves would have been several steps too far!), basic pastry, the afore-mentioned risotto, flapjacks, breadandbutter pudding, probably scones or something. We were taught about thickening sauces, about how cornflour works, etc. - useful stuff for basic knowledge.

I heard, but it might have been apocryphal, that about 10 years later, children were pretty much being taught how to microwave tv dinners in whatever home ec became before it was food tech - can anyone verify that? Certainly actual cooking basics seemed to have fallen by the wayside. :(

To add to 665's post you must also include a discussion about why they should clean up after themselves and an explanation of why they can't use the dishwasher.

If you are to continue this with the second group the group must start off by finding and putting random wet drying cloths in the bin for wet cloths and start the lesson with equipment that isn't fully clean or dry.

I can see how it's a struggle for teachers.

However at my school an at dds school the cooking rooms are in rotation with assistant staff, to clear up anything the kids haven't had time to and weigh out ingredients.

The lessons are 1hour 50minutes long and the kids usually wash up and dry their own things.

I think teachers do a great job. But I can't see how time restrictions mean the method is wrong. When using flour in a sauce you have to cook it throughly. Not throw it near the end and pop in the oven.

Is the case of dds Mac N cheese. They watched a video and took notes of Gordon Ramsey cooking the same meal, where he put the flour in early. Then the teacher gave them a method that was different.

Why make them watch and take notes if that's not how you are going to do it?

My son's school has so far made - a sandwich, a fruit salad, a couscous salad and cheese on toast! I did more complicated stuff than that at primary school!

My son did Food Tech and his tomato based pasta sauce caught alight whilst the Ofstead inspector was in the room

DD has only once brought home something inedible from class, strangely it was the pizza she made. They've made lots of simple, tasty dishes: chicken fajitas, vegetarian pasta, curry, apple crumble etc. All things which could be recreated easily. DD enjoys cooking, I think her teacher is doing a great job! School provide all the ingredients (which pupils have to weigh out), so no frantic last-minute hunting for things either.

Just to add, they were also given a recipe book at the start of term, so they can recreate them.

the beast

how on earth did it get to that.

my food tech lessons at school consisted of.

two/three tutor groups

half the class would read through books and choose a recipe that fitted the brief.

write up said recipe.

other half cook.

no excessive mess, no messing about. Kids getting on with the cooking amd producing edible food to take home

Wtf happened

DS did Food Tech in Y7, 8 and 9, but didn't choose it for a GCSE option.

He is not the world's most competent child in practical areas. however, every single thing he made was more than edible, in many cases extremely tasty. The school seemed to have a policy of teaching basic skills in Y7 (cook pasta, rice, couscous, potatoes; make good white sauce; that kind of thing), 'student cooking to keep alive' in Y8 - spag bol, shepherd's pie, tasty thick soups, and then 'cooking to impress a little more' in Y9 - a variety of puddings, cakes, lasagne, meatballs etc.

The only problem I remember was an overcooked stir fry.

A few points I suppose - schools now rarely provide ingredients as it would be a choice between that and support staff - or even - paper - budgets are tight.

The time constraints can be be dependent on where a schools focus is - double periods are hard to deal with for some academic subjects - so practical subjects just don’t get them - and the same may be true of internal funding - one food room 1000 students means not all food lessons are in food rooms - so availability of facilities is ltd - so Lots of students cook at once with limited equipment.

Most secondary school student are not able to / have never - washed up by hand -
used a peeler - are safe with a knife unsupervised - or are so surprised that , say, creaming butter into sugar requires physical effort,t that they complain vociferously for up to ten minutes that they cant use an electric mixer rather than just do it in the way you demonstrated to them. You can tell me that’s not the case for your child - but in a group of say 25 only two would have all those skills.

If you let them choose their own recipe you WILL be faced with a bag full of whole octopus at some point - some parents are very proud of their "foody"ness and think this is ok - oh and they wont have shown their child how to deal with it...and that’s out of your two minutes.

One of the reasons the lessons are dummed down is that kids do less cooking at home and have much lower basic skill level. Raw and unprocessed ingredient handling is rarer. ( see cant use a peeler or a knife) so they are starting at an appropriate level for their skills.

The example of when to thicken a sauce and how is open to debate - the process may well have been: research, comparison, draw conclusions , test. - so they researched one or more methods and tested one...just not the same one as in the video

I wouldn’t be a food teacher if you paid me in Gin - they are almost universally awesome

beast that's just embarrassing that kids of secondary school age can't do such basics.

guess it shows how vital it is that we teach this stuff. my dd made spaghetti and meatballs and a tomato sauce a couple of weeks ago. not a stealth boast akd obviously sone assistance required when it came to blending the sauce and draining the pasta.

but it does show how capable kids can be when given the chance.