Food processing – temperature, time and nutrient retention
Design & TechnologyFood & TextilesAges 14–15
Use it with your class: students open it from a link or a QR code, with no account needed.
Next in Food & Textiles
The kitchen simulates cooking a dish through four steps: prep, marinating or mixing, cooking, and serving. Students pick an ingredient, a cooking method (boiling, steaming, frying, or mixing with no heat), set the temperature and time, then watch the dish's doneness, remaining vitamins, and bacteria count in the food change minute by minute. Click Chop Finely to see the food cook faster but lose more vitamins.
Lesson: The food processing procedure and how temperature and time affect nutritional value and food safety
What it shows
Cooking has to balance food safety against nutrient loss. Heating above about 70 °C kills bacteria, and in the model the count drops tenfold in a time that gets shorter as the temperature rises. Heat also destroys water-soluble vitamins such as vitamin C and B1 by roughly exponential decay, and boiling adds extra loss as vitamins leach into the water. Steaming loses less, frying cooks quickly at high temperature, and mixing without heat keeps almost all vitamins but does not kill bacteria. Chopping food finely speeds cooking but increases the vitamin loss.
How to use
Select a Main ingredient and a Cooking method, set the Cooking temperature and Cooking time, and press Run to watch doneness, remaining vitamin and bacteria change minute by minute. Compare boiling and steaming for the same ingredient and time, then try a temperature below 70 °C. Click Chop Finely and repeat to see the trade-off. Click the steps in the process diagram, from Prep to Serve, to follow the whole procedure.
Parameters you can change
- Main ingredient Mustard greens (vitamin C 30 mg/100 g), Potato (vitamin C 20 mg/100 g), Lean pork (vitamin B1 0.9 mg/100 g)
- Cooking method Boiling in water, Steaming, Frying in oil, Mixing, no heat
- Cooking temperature 25–190 °C
- Cooking time 0–40 min
- Chop ingredients finely during prep
Questions to explore
- For mustard greens cooked for 10 minutes, how much more vitamin C remains after steaming than after boiling?
- Why is a dish cooked at 60 °C still unsafe, even after a long cooking time?
- Why does the no-heat mixed dish keep the most vitamin, and what must be done to make it safe to eat?
