Assignment — invent a recipe

A written account of an invented dish, argued before it is cooked — preparation process, nutritional composition and sensory prediction.

Due: 29 March 2027 · Weight: 40%

A dish can be described in full before a single ingredient is heated. This assignment asks for that description: a recipe argued into existence, then checked against what is already known about the materials involved, rather than against a stove.

The brief#

Invent a dish. Write the account of it that a competent cook would need in order to reproduce it, and that a nutritionist would need in order to assess it, without either of them having seen it made.

The dish is not prepared or cooked for this submission. What is being assessed is the reasoning: whether the student can predict, from the ingredients and the process described, what the result will be — in composition and in the senses.

What you submit#

A written account, structured in three parts.

Preparation process. The method as a numbered sequence of steps, each naming an action, an ingredient and a reason. “Dice the onion finely” is a step; “dice the onion finely, because a larger surface area shortens the cooking time and changes how much of its sulfur compounds volatilise” is the standard this assignment holds itself to.

Nutritional composition. A table of the dish’s nutritional content — energy, protein, fat, carbohydrate and any other figure relevant to the dish’s stated purpose — computed from its ingredients. Every figure must trace to a named food-composition database: USDA FoodData Central or FSANZ NUTTAB (Australian Food Composition Database) are both acceptable, and a different national database is acceptable if it is named and cited in the same way. Cite the specific food entry used for each ingredient, not the database in general — “chicken breast, raw” is not a citation; “chicken, broilers or fryers, breast, meat only, raw — FDC ID 171077” is.

Sensory description. A prediction of colour, aroma, flavour and texture, addressed separately. This section is not a marketing paragraph; it is a claim the student is willing to defend against the finished dish when the same recipe is re-examined in week 12.

How it is marked#

The marking block above renders as a criterion table. In brief: the preparation process and the nutritional composition carry the most weight, because they are the parts of the account that can be checked against a source rather than taken on trust; the sensory description is judged on precision of language rather than on whether the dish sounds appealing; sources are marked on whether a reader could locate the exact database entry cited, not merely on whether a database is named somewhere in the document.