Year 10 take on the sausage roll
Last week, Ms Jalili’s Year 10 Food Technology students took on the culinary challenge of creating the perfect meat-free sausage roll. They were so good, even the carnivores loved them!
Things are changing rapidly in the world of food, just ask Ms Jalili’s Year 10 Food Tech students. Growing concerns about animal welfare, climate change and personal health have resulted in a perfect plant-based storm, with a growing number of people cutting down on their meat intake or giving it up completely. This has led to the rise of dubiously named meat-free products like cheeze, chikken, bakon and prawnz, but therein lies a different story.
As part of their Food Tech studies, Year 10 have been looking at the different nutrients in food and how they affect our health and wellbeing. They’ve learnt about food allergies and how conditions such as diabetes and coeliac disease affect the body. This includes looking at food and product labels to find hidden sources of gluten before they can cause a problem. They’ve also researched how our food and nutritional needs change at different stages of our life. For example, children require a varied diet, teenagers need energy and iron-rich foods, adults require a balanced diet and the elderly need less energy but must also maintain their calcium levels.
Year 10 have been thinking about how to balance different dietary requirements – gluten-free, sugar-free, meat-free – and yet still produce fresh, tasty, wholesome food that people like to eat.
Australians are enthusiastic consumers of the classic sausage roll, in fact, we love them nearly as much as we love our meat pies. So, Ms Jalili set Year 10 a challenge: cook a meat-free sausage roll making sure that it has the same amount of flavour, texture and protein as the meat version.
Challenge accepted, said Year 10!
Working in pairs, they set about whizzing up their ‘sausage mince’ – a combination of oats, lentils, cottage cheese (hello protein), sunflower seeds and onion – in their food processors, rolling out their pastry, spooning out the filling, and carefully rolling it all up, before slicing them up into neat rectangles and popping them into the oven.
Soon the waft of golden pastry had everyone salivating. And the good news? They were delicious. Even Dr Scott couldn’t tell the difference.
To paraphrase ACDC, it’s a long way to the shop if you want a sausage roll…. particularly ones as healthy and delicious as these. So just ask one of our Year 10 Food Tech students for the meat-free recipe. You won’t be disappointed!
Bon appétit everyone!