Waffles Makeover
Neala Ye
St Kentigern College
Year 11 Food Technology, 18-week project
Teacher: Carolyn Norquay
When Neala was asked to develop a healthier version of a favourite family recipe, she decided this was a good opportunity to experiment with her new birthday gift, a waffle maker. She looked at basic batters and considered how she could make them more wholesome without losing any of the taste her family enjoyed.
Neala completed a number of product development trials, mostly based on altering ingredients to reduce fat, sugar and salt, and increasing the amount of fibre. She found that small changes, such as using half an egg yolk rather than a whole, lowered the cholesterol content of the mixture. The egg experiment was actually done when Neala was trialling ingredients for taste, but she notes that it ended up serving both purposes.
Neala tried various amounts of wholemeal flour mixed with white. "My classmates were stakeholders and most didn't favour the wholemeal because it made the waffle look darker. They were also disappointed, because they thought the bran was chocolate chips!"
After developing her batter, she then investigated suitable toppings for the waffles. Traditional toppings such as syrup are high in sugar, so she looked at other options – in-season fruit (with strawberries a particular favourite), bananas, and frozen fruit products such as sorbet, gelato and yoghurt to replace ice cream.
When she trialled each batter and topping, Neala entered the ingredients into Foodworks on the school computer. Foodworks is a nutritional analysis program that shows the effects that altering ingredients would have on the outcome.
Neala worked out the cost of making eight waffles and her batter was 13 cents per waffle as opposed to 16 cents with the original recipe, a significant saving if making the product in bulk.
After concluding her development work, Neala reported back to one of her stakeholders, the editor of The Healthy Food Guide magazine. Writing in the style of a magazine article, she described her development work and conclusions. She notes that a waffle maker isn't essential as the batter makes delicious pancakes as well.
"As well as learning how the technological process works, I learnt that I had to control everything when trialling – I tried to bring my own ingredients and equipment so that everything, including measurement, was the same".
Teacher comment
It was a great idea to make better use of a piece of equipment that often gets left at the back of the cupboard. Neala has developed skills that she can apply to any recipe to make it healthier, a skill that should last her a lifetime.
Read Neala's recipe from her student folder.
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