Professor Pete Cullen
George Chappell, Lizzie Robbins, Jannah Zulkefli, Tin Wai
Hung
Introduction
We wanted to find out whether different cooking
methods- boiling and steaming- have effects on
the concentration of vitamin C in new potatoes.
Proposed Method
We took 3 potatoes for each cooking method
and halved them.
One half was kept raw to measure the
concentration of vitamin C before cooking (as
this may vary between potatoes) and the other
half was cooked.
The vitamin C of the cooked potato can then be
determined, and any differences can be
calculated.
Problems with our Proposed Method
When carrying out the titration against the raw
new potatoes, the vitamin C concentration was
proven to be a lot smaller than expected. The
average titre was 1.1ml which is far too small to
ensure an accurate measurement, for which a titre
of at least 5mL is required.
Titration Of Raw Potatoes Without Skin With DCPIP
We believed the low vitamin C concentration could
have possibly been due to the removal of the skin
before titration, as the skin could have contained a
high proportion of vitamin C in the potatoes. To
investigate this possibility, for the following
titrations of the raw potatoes we included the
skin.
Vitamin C in New Potatoes
Titration Of Raw Potatoes With Skin With DCPIP
The results showed that the inclusion
of the skin made little to no
difference to the concentration of
vitamin C in the potato sample. The
average titre was 1.2ml. This titre is
still far too small to be accurate.
The results also showed that the
concentration of vitamin C in new
potatoes varies. This is because
although the same mass of new
potatoes were used in the titration,
the volume of DCPIP is not constant.
We calculated the mass of vitamin C in
each of our samples and this had a
range of 0.06-0.27mg.
As the vitamin C concentration is very
small in the raw new potatoes, we
believed that it would the same or
even smaller in the boiled and steamed
new potatoes. This would be
inaccurate for us to compare the two
cooking methods, so we decided not to
proceed with determining the
concentration of vitamin C in boiled
and steamed new potatoes. Instead,
we investigated the accuracy of our
titration by plotting a standard curve.
u
Standardisation of DCPIP
Raw New Potatoes
To produce the standard curve, we added known amounts
of vitamin C and carried out a titration (as shown by the
blue data points). We know that the stoichiometric ratio
between the vitamin C to DCPIP is 1:1., therefore the
graph should be a straight line through the origin.
Because our data lies in a straight line, this shows that
the titrations are accurate. We would have liked to carry
out titrations at a greater range of known amounts of
vitamin C. However, due to time constraints, this was not
possible.
The red data points show the corresponding vitamin C
mass to the titrations we carried out on samples of raw
potato.
Conclusion
The Vitamin C concentration varied greatly
between potatoes.
The skin of the potatoes had no significant effect
on the concentration of vitamin C in the potato
sample.
We found the titration method to be quite
accurate, as shown by our standard curve.