KS2 / KS3 Design and Technology: The story behind a salad

CHILD: Salad!

STEFAN GATES: I know what you're thinking… "Salad - boring." But no no! Come back come back come back! We're going to make thisinteresting if it kills me. Now you can invent your own salad. Loads of people have. So let's take some lettuce andsome cucumber and what have you got? A really boring salad. But… lettuce plus dressing croutons chicken and a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese equals Caesar salad.

Now listen up. Caesar salad wasinvented by the great Roman dictator in 70 BC. He'd stayed into wash his hair and watch CBBC when he should havebeen out invading Britain. Actually that's a lie. It was actually inventedby a guy called Caesar who was Italian and he was working in Mexico and America. It's a much more boring story. I prefer the Roman dictator one. Or start with lettuce and add grapes celery walnuts and apples and bingo you've got a Waldorf salad. And Waldorf is the nameof the hotel in New York where it was first served. There you go. Raw history in food form.

In these greenhouses in Kent they grow salad all year round. And despite being in a nice warm greenhouse this salad crop iscool as a cucumber. That's because er it is a cucumber.

What we've got here is one of our cucumber plants. We are showing you here how it doesn't grow in soil. We don't use soil. We use a type of sponge called rock wool. It's much better for us than soil because it doesn't harbour lots of pests and diseases and you can easily recycle it when you're finished with it. So when this has been finished with it gets turned into building blocks. So the roots grow into this spongy stuff. As you'll see it's quite wet at the moment because the water comes through this dropper and goes into the sponge. But the roots of the plant they grow through all of this just like it would do through soil. Everything we do in here is about control. The plants grow much betterwhen we can control the environment that they're in really really carefully. It's about giving them everythingthey need and in return they provide us with as many cucumbers as they can manage. So if we give them the right temperature the right feed mix the right amount of water the right amount of light and if we take care that they don't get too many pests and diseases on them then we make sure that we get a really healthy strong crop of cucumbers.

Whoa whoa whoa! What's going on?!

STYLUS SCRATCHES

Can we rewind a bit?! Look I am not being funny but those cucumbers are all curly. The key to us getting a straight cucumber is that we use gravity. We grow the cucumber plants up wires so they might try and grow" a little bit bendy but the weight of the cucumber
just with the gravity the weight will straighten it out. So that cucumber bent there will end up looking much more like this one very soon. The skin of a cucumber is the most nutritious part but it's the seeds that contain the flavour. The amazing thing about cucumbers is that they look very solid. Ow! But the reality is they are made up of loads and loads of water. Take a look at this. This machine separates the liquid from the solids in the cucumber. You're left with the mushy pulp and a glass of green juice. Yum! There we are. It looks as if it is about half and half but in actual fact there's loads of water still left inside this. Let's have a look.

A cucumber actually has 95% water and only 5% solid.

Right enough of them long pointy things. Time to talk about something a bit more round and oniony. They're a bit of a mystery customer. Nobody really knows exactly where the first onion came from but there is evidence our ancestors were eating them before farming or even writing were invented. In ancient Egypt people were even paid in onions. Imagine getting these as pocket money!

"Thanks Dad(!)"

Onions are high in vitamin C and fibre and in the Middle Ages onions were eaten as a healthy breakfast. Yuk! They were also used in medicine to cure headaches snake bites and even hair loss. Complete twaddle. Very entertaining to watch.

Onions will just keep on growing until the leaves turn yellow and go a bit droopy. They can be harvested at any size but it's best to wait for a sunny day and then leave them to sunbathe a little while to dry out.

Onions hide a secret that will bring a tear to your eye.

Now on their own they're quite friendly little fellas. They smell ever-so-slightly oniony but chop into them… and you start releasing two chemicals that combine… …and they'll soon have me crying like a baby. The chemical reaction is like a time bomb waiting to explode when you cut up the onion. Loads of people seem to have advice on how to stop this problem but in my experience none of them work - even a snorkel! The trouble is it's a gas…it's a gas in the air so it comes in through your mouth anyway wherever it comes from and you still cry like a baby! Luckily red onions have no effect on me and that's what I'm throwing into my Greek salad.

OK here we go! Along with tomatoes and more tomatoes and cucumber go my trusty red onions plus red peppers herbs and a bit of elbow grease. And then the bit that really makes this Greek is this stuff here - feta cheese. Feta cheese is really classically Greek. This one's made from sheep's milk and goat's milk which gives it a really nice kind of tang to it. It's absolutely delicious. Then a few Greek olives. And that… …it's Greek it's a salad it's got vegetables in but it's definitely NOT boring.