Gourmet Burger Builder – a great resource for remote learning or homework

Gourmet Burger Builder is an interactive activity which challenges pupils to create their own Gourmet Burger using beef or lamb mince and a variety of vegetables, fruit, cheese, spices and herbs.

The activity goes through the stages of ingredient selection, mixing, dividing, shaping, cooking and assembly. A detailed personalised step-by-step recipe is automatically generated so that pupils can make and cook their own burger in the classroom or at home. In addition, food skills are highlighted along with nutrition information – enabling pupils to develop ideas and modify their designs.

A teacher’s guide and additional resources, including six lesson themes (presented as PowerPoint presentations, structured worksheets that can be used with any theme, and burger toppings and sides food cards) are available to support the use of the Gourmet Burger Builder.

Pam Major, Head of Food and Nutrition at St. Francis’ College, Letchworth, used Gourmet Burger Builder for remote learning with her year 7 classes during the COVID-19 school closures.

Pam says:

“I used the Gourmet burger Builder as a home learning activity for Year 7 classes. I have used it in the past, but it adapts well to a homework activity or remote task. I started the lesson (on Teams) by showing a brief presentation about designing a burger and discussing different flavour combinations and influences of cuisines from other countries. I then shared the Gourmet Burger Builder screen and took them through every stage of how to put their burger together. After any questions, it was over to them to produce their own burger recipes. They sent me their completed recipes and I gave some feedback on the combination of ingredients used and points to consider when they made them the following week. After they had made them they sent some great photos of the results.

I gave a basic vegetarian burger recipe to my pupils that don’t eat meat. They still completed the online design but then added their chosen additional ingredients to the vegetarian burger mixture. They also used their chosen bread and extra ingredients to complete their burgers.”

Two of Pam’s students said:

“I really enjoyed using this as it was very easy to follow and great fun building up the burger and getting to choose your favourite ingredients to put in it. I thought that there was a really big range of ingredients to choose from and I liked how they gave hygiene and safety points after each ingredient and the method was very easy to follow and my final burger was really nice!” 

Pupil, Year 7

“The Gourmet Burger Builder is a useful website when it comes to people who might not know how to make a burger. You can use it easily and it’s simple to follow through. I quite liked the website, it allowed me to get as creative as possible and have fun with what I was doing. At the end, I was very impressed, it gave me a whole recipe (with my burger ingredients), nutritional information, guidelines methods and a whole lot more than just being taught how to make your own burger.  The options of what you could put in the burger were quite good.  I like the fact that they included fruit, so you can get more creative and really bring the burger alive. To finish it showed you around what your burger could look like and gave you the option to name it which I thought was a nice feature.” 

Pupil, Year 7

To find out more about Gourmet Burger Builder, click here.