KidsFoodJourney Week 4: Fruit & Veg Sculptures; Making Butter; the Five Tastes; Mayan Chocolate
Week 4
P2 - 4 (Year 1 - 3) Home Lesson Plan
Fruit & Veg Sculptures; Making Butter; the Five Tastes; Mayan Chocolate
Before starting these activities please read this introduction to KidsFoodJourney, and also the course aims & core concepts outlined in Week 1’s lesson plan.
Lesson Outline
Tiny Tastes
Snacktivity: fruit and vegetable sculptures
Make your own butter
Learn the five tastes
Mayan chocolate
Story time
Tiny Tastes
We start the lesson with our no-pressure Tiny Tastes experiment: a repetition of the food we tried in week 1. Whether the children want to simply smell it, just lick it, or are happy to eat (any quantity of) the food – that’s fine. Whatever they go for, can they describe what it’s like this time? How does it smell? If they taste it, do they like it better than last time? Does it taste different to them this time? Does it taste more familiar?
Snack-Time Activity: Fruit & Vegetable Sculptures
We were joined by a member of staff who works as an archaeologist, and this inspired us to introduce historical food activities into some of our workshops. One session was Jacobite-themed, so we focused on the table decorations that were popular around that time for banquets. When flowers were out of season, they would create elaborate sculptures out of carved vegetables.
"Colours and presentation were extremely important at the rich man’s table, especially when demonstrating one’s wealth, and therefore power, to guests. Many types of edible flower were used, both for taste and visual appeal. Flowers were also set at table to enhance the presentation of the food. Large and elaborate sculptures and settings of ‘flowers’ were even made of cut vegetables and herbs, if attractive flowers were not in season." Historyextra.com
Here are some impressive pictures of modern carved fruit and vegetable sculptures to inspire you.
There are lots of edible character ideas out there. These two are among my favourites, chosen for cuteness plus importantly showcasing a range of flavours, including a number of the tastes we will explore later: sweet raisins; salty, umami olives; and green apples can be a bit sour. Be careful about making assumptions when it comes to children and olives: many children love them! They’re often nicer if you give them a good rinse to wash off some of the salty brine, it takes the bitterness down as well.
Excuse my drawing!
Apple Frog Prince how-to
Olive penguins how-to (I left out the scarf and use green olives as they were the biggest I could find)
Make Your Own Butter
I was amazed the first time I made butter: it’s something most of us take for granted, giving no thought to how it’s made. It’s very simple, if a bit of a work-out.
I halve and freeze this once it’s made, and use half in our egg mayo snack (week 5) and half in our tea party (week 6). It defrosts just fine. Otherwise use within a few days – as it will contain some buttermilk and is unsalted, it won’t last as long as shop-bought butter.
All you need is:
A big jar with a tight lid
A marble (not essential but useful)
600ml fresh double cream (not Elmlea, which isn’t real cream)
A sieve
Butter pats – not essential!
Pour the cream into the jar, add the marble, screw that lid on tight and shake, shake, shake! It takes about 20 minutes of energetic shaking for the butter to be ready, so everyone will have their turn. Take the lid off every now and then and have a look at the different stages as the cream turns into whipped cream, then starts to separate (it will look like scrambled egg). When it’s nearly ready you will start to hear the marble clinking around in the buttermilk, and there’s no mistaking the end product: you’ll have a distinct yellow butter, with thin buttermilk separated out.
Sieve off and keep the buttermilk (see below), and then squeeze as much buttermilk out of the butter as possible, under cold running water so it doesn’t start to melt. This is where the butter pats come in useful, but they are by no means essential. If you have them, you just keep pressing and squeezing the butter over a large bowl, to wring as much buttermilk out as possible while not heating the butter with your warm hands. It’s the buttermilk that makes butter turn quickly rancid, as it goes off much more quickly than the high-fat butter.
Why not use your buttermilk for making soda bread (recipe here, swap out the yoghurt for buttermilk)? This can then be frozen ready for your cress to grow, and the whole lot used in your egg mayonnaise sandwich in the week 5 lesson!
Learn the Five Tastes Game
Stick your tongue out for someone to have a good look at. See the little bumps all over it? Those are your taste buds. Taste buds aren’t grouped off into ‘zones’, as we used to think. We have buds for all the five tastes all around our tongue.
The five tastes are: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami.
Umami is unfamiliar to many people. The term became recognised in the 1980s, and translates from Japanese to mean ‘mouth-filling deliciousness’. It describes the intensely savoury flavour of glutamate, found in foods such as anchovies, olives, Worcestershire sauce, Marmite, fish sauces and broths, shellfish, Parmesan cheese, seared steak, cooked tomatoes, mushrooms, soy sauce, seaweed etc. It’s essential to making food taste savoury, delicious and rich. Umami-less savoury food is bland food!
I love this activity as a hands-on way to become familiar with each taste. The idea came from these Dutch school taste education lessons that first inspired KidsFoodJourney.
Step one
Without the children seeing, fill five little cups with:
1. Salt water (dissolve ½ teaspoon salt in water)
2. Sugar water (same with ½ teaspoon sugar)
3. Grapefruit juice (sour)
4. Cold coffee (bitter)
5. Marmite dissolved in water (umami)
Talk to the children about the five tastes.
Don’t tell the children what each cup contains. Give them some cotton buds to dip into each cup and suck to taste the liquid, then they need to try and guess which is which. Surprisingly, the sugar water isn’t usually the favourite – they usually prefer the grapefruit juice or coffee, and I have a job stopping some children from drinking the coffee!
Step two
Now it’s time to put our new tastes knowledge into practice. Lay out:
1. Salty crackers, pretzels, salted popcorn or nuts
2. Sweet raisins / dried fruit
3. Slices of grapefruit, lime or lemon
4. 85% dark chocolate (bitter)
5. Seaweed crisps, biltong, olives, shavings of Parmesan or Marmite on little bits of cracker or bread
Challenge the children to sort them into the five tastes.
Mayan Hot Chocolate
Our final tastes activity is making and trying two types of hot chocolate. One is the regular sweet modern cocoa or drinking chocolate, the other is dark, rich, bitter, spiced hot chocolate made to a re-creation of an ancient Mayan recipe.
Watch this lovely video of the hot chocolate being traditionally made.
Mayan hot chocolate recipe, serves 4
Combine the following in a saucepan and stir until the chocolate melts:
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
A pinch of ground black pepper or cayenne pepper (go easy and test for spice levels!)
45g 85% cocoa dark chocolate (or minimum 70%)
4 cups milk or water
2 teaspoons sugar, or to taste (keep the bitterness, don’t make it too sweet)
Which hot chocolate do the children prefer?
My colleague made up a fantastic story to accompany this about a little girl who discovered cacao beans, and was let into the secret recipe for this magical drink…Impressively it was off the top of his head so unfortunately I can’t share it with you, but I’m sure you can come up with something equally exciting! You could use that as your story time, or you could use one of the resources below.
A story to finish
We are so lucky at KFJ to have a professional storyteller among our staff. Chris ends every session with an energetic, sometimes musical, always hilarious story about food. Here he is telling the story of the three wishes and the sausage.
We have found the children don’t grow out of loving this – if anything the older ones are even more engaged. We tell a story at the end of KFJ sessions from ages 4 – 11, and they all love them. You don’t have to be a professional to tell the story, just make sure it’s ‘on message’, and not one that teaches children that sweets and cakes are great fun while broccoli is a chore! Be careful also about stories that focus on weight, or sort foods into black and white ‘healthy/unhealthy’ categories. We never talk about weight in KFJ, and avoid telling children that certain foods are better or worse than others. We’re trying to widen their tasting horizons and place a range of foods on a more level playing field for children to learn to genuinely enjoy eating a varied diet.
Kit List
600ml double cream
Large jam jar
Marble (not essential)
Sieve
Butter pats (not essential)
Salty food: salty crackers, pretzels, salted popcorn or crisps
Sweet food: raisins / dried fruit
Sour food: slices of grapefruit, lime or lemon
Bitter food: 85% dark chocolate
Umami food: seaweed crisps, biltong, olives, shavings of Parmesan or Marmite on little bits of cracker or bread
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
A pinch of ground black pepper or cayenne pepper
100g 85% cocoa dark chocolate (or minimum 70%)
4 cups milk or water
3 teaspoons sugar
5 pots / cups for tastes liquids
Marmite
Grapefruit juice
A little coffee
A teaspoon salt
Cotton buds
Green apple
Big black or green olives
Small black olives
Cream cheese
Carrot
Toothpicks
A few grapes