A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
When I typed “celery” into the CC Search box to search a few museums’ public domain collections to illustrate my previous post on celery on restaurant menus, I was expecting one or two results, perhaps a still life. And so I was surprised when the search returned a bunch of objects called “celery vases” from […]
Let’s face it: a cup of tea can taste great and be a relaxing ritual, but the caffeine might be the biggest attraction. And if you want to get the most (or least) in your cup, scientific articles can be a valuable resource. In particular, some of the papers by a group from the University […]
Preface: For various reasons, the images in this post (which are ’embeds’ from Google’s Ngram Viewer) might not going to look quite right — there will be spillover across the right boundary and spacing will be quirky. To see higher quality versions of the charts, click on the chart and it will appear all by […]
(Updated, 3/15/17: new chart) For the last few months, I have been weighing oranges before and after peeling to see what fraction of the orange is edible (by weight). I had done similar work previously to measure the edible percentage of avocados, finding that Haas avocados are roughly 70% edible by weight across a span of 125 […]
I bought some fava beans yesterday to use in a recipe from Elizabeth Andoh’s “Kansha” and decided to pull out my scale to document the tedious bean peeling routine. I started with 552 grams of whole fava bean pods. Pod removal netted me 192 grams of skin-on beans. I blanched the skin-on beans for 1 […]
During an interview on To the Best of Our Knowledge, Ellen Ruppel Shell, the author of “Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture,” dropped an amazing fact: we eat more shrimp today in the U.S. than tuna fish. It was one of those “wow” statistics that I had to check out for myself. Fortunately, the […]
Although pizza baking in the San Francisco Bay Area and other locations (e.g., Sunset’s list) has undergone a renaissance in recent years with higher-quality ingredients, improved techniques, and better ovens, I think that the service side of the pizza scene needs some serious work. I’m not talking about the people who take your order or […]
A few weeks ago, I reviewed an academic paper on tea brewing — how brewing technique and tea brand affect caffeine and dissolved solids levels. In that paper, the authors demonstrated that the highest level of dissolved solids (which correlates with flavor and possibly anti-oxidants) come from loose leaves or a well-agitated tea bag, and […]
(Updated 2/19/17: fixed broken links, converted charts to a Tableau Public story, added a new section about a Harvard University science & cooking lecture from 2012 that included similar plots) In a previous post, I described my favorite chocolate chunk cookie, made using a recipe adapted from dessert genius Jacques Torres by David Leite in […]
(Updated 10/23/16: new image, fixed broken links) Sometimes, when afternoon fatigue weighs me down at the office or on groggy weekend mornings, my mind drifts to thoughts of tea and caffeine. How could I brew the most potent cup of tea to break out of the doldrums? What are the flavor trade-offs? Among the many […]