Nea 2 food technology

Hi, grade 9 food tech student here.
It is 100% a complex dessert if you're making all the components yourself instead of taking shortcuts (eg. premade pastry). However I wouldn't say it would be particularly high in iron. What are you planning to write for your recipe justification? If you justify it very well then you miiiight be able to get away with it but there are probably better options.
Nuts are a good source of iron so you could look for recipes containing them. You might find a decent number of desserts containing ground almonds. If they include dark chocolate then that's also high enough in iron that you wouldn't have a problem justifying it.

Tysmmm - I thought no one would reply to my thread because not many ppl do food tech
Do you think I should do this instead?

That could actually be good for a high iron dessert - dried fruit is also a source of iron as well as the almonds. It would be especially good if you did something fancy with the pastry lid, either something like the photo, latticed or anything else u fancy, just to add a little bit extra skill and decoration. What are your other dishes?

Yeah I know right, food tech doesn't seem particularly popular. There were a fair few doing it at my school but I hadn't heard of anyone at other schools doing it

Lasagne definitely has iron in from the beef, so if that's what you want to do perhaps you could adapt it to be higher in iron? Could you find a way to add lentils or beans (eg kidney beans, not green beans) or spinach?

Tysmm - even though I haven’t started doing the analysis for food tech and since you got a 9 how did you structure your analysis or what you included in it to achieve a 9 since everything has changed as for this year in terms of gcse 2021 exam changes, nea 2 is now 50% of the course and the written exam is 50% as it has always been I believe

I have quite a long list of all the little parts that I put into it and how I organised it. It's on my school account at the moment so I'll reply with it once I've had a chance to find it.

Also do you definitely only have to do 2 dishes? All the briefs last year were 3 dishes in the 3 hours

I have quite a long list of all the little parts that I put into it and how I organised it. It's on my school account at the moment so I'll reply with it once I've had a chance to find it.

Also do you definitely only have to do 2 dishes? All the briefs last year were 3 dishes in the 3 hours

Sorry I'd completely forgotten - I've been pretty busy this week.
This is how I did the coursework:
-My brief as a title
- task analysis (define key words in brief, show u know what the brief is asking of u)
- Primary research ( you could do a shop survey (look at online supermarket pages) for popular high iron foods, or do an actual survey of real people u know. Try to make it fit with the brief and the dishes you're making.
- Secondary research (1-2 pages of what you've researched to relate to your brief - foods high in iron, iron requirements for different age and gender groups and why they are what they are, why iron is needed, etc)
- Target profile (write about who specifically you're targeting your dishes for - kids? adults? people trying to get fit/ eat healthier? It's up to you
- 10x recipe ideas and notes about how they fit the brief or could fit it better
- Writing about what recipes I picked to make for the skills demonstration practicals (these were in normal lessons for me, not the 3 hours) and justifying why they fit the brief and target group.
- Evaluation of each of those dishes (what u made, photo with candidate number, ingredients, equipment, skills shown, quality and critical controls, sensory analysis with explained star profile, nutritional analysis. Do that for each dish.

The rest (the actual 3hr practical stuff) is on my memory stick so I'll get that to u asap.

Also keep a note of any websites u use to do a bibliography at the end.

Also bear in mind that I did my NEA pre-covid so if ur told you need to do anything slightly differently or add in anything extra then do that because idk all the details of how they've changed it this year, but what I've said should still hopefully be a good start

TYSMM - what do you mean by a brief? is it the task title (in my case, good source of iron? im currently searching, finding popular iron food surveys but im struggling to find one :/
Your tips on nea coursework were VERY helpful though..thanks again

Sorry yes by brief I do mean the task title.

If you can't find surveys online why not do your own? I thought of 5-10 questions relating to my brief and asked a load of people at school then put the results into bar charts.

And no problem! I'm happy to be able to help

What types of questions did you ask (for some ideas)

I’m struggling on the next dish I should do
I have to pick 1 more since the exam boards stated that we have to do 2 dishes within 3 hours
I chose lasagne, did my research but it turns out that it is not a good source of iron

I'm doing the iron task and was also planning on doing a lasagne as a main. To add extra iron i am going to do spinach pasta