Slices of Blue Sky

Charting Mexican Restaurant Chains

May 5, 2019 No Comments

Tacos for 89 cents from Robert Couse-Baker on Flickr

This post was inspired by Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, by Gustavo Arellano (2012, Scribner), an ambitious and entertaining book that reviews the history of America’s love of Mexican food using profiles of business people, restaurateurs, cooks, and more (my 2017 review of Taco USA).

Chain restaurants played a critical role in expanding Mexican food’s popularity across the USA ¹. And so Arellano spends many pages discussing their rise (and fall, in some cases).

As I read those sections, the restaurant counts caught my attention — a chance to make charts! So I wrote down what I saw in the book, and later went to the library and internet to find more data. Annual reports were on-line for Taco Bell and Chipotle, and often had restaurant counts. For the smaller or departed chains of Chi-Chi’s and El Torito, my internet searches brought me to the company profiles at Funding Universe and an article in Louisville Business First.

Although the dataset is incomplete, I thought it worthwhile to post what I have — perhaps a commenter will fill in the blanks or suggest other chains that should be charted. (For an autosized view of the chart, visit the my chart of Mexican restaurants at Tableau Public.)

Taco Bell’s major growth was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, reaching a peak near 7,000 locations in 1999. Chipotle’s year after year growth continues and they plan on opening new stores (although the company’s food safety issues hurt their revenues, its effect didn’t have much impact on the location count). Both Chi-Chi’s and El Torito hit their peaks around 1990².

One other factoid from the annual reports is a breakdown of where people buy Mexican food. The 2002 Annual Report from Taco Bell’s parent company (Yum! Brands) claims that market share for Mexican quick service restaurants was 72% for Taco Bell, 18% for independents, and 10% for 4 other chains³.

Image Credit

Photo of 11 cents change from Robert Couse-Baker’s Flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License

Notes

Ingredients, Japan Travel, Main Dishes

There’s Devil’s Tongue in My Stew

January 20, 2019 4 Comments

One of the many interesting ingredients in the Japanese pantry is konnyaku — a versatile, low calorie food with a highly distinctive texture. It’s rubbery and springier than even finger jello¹.

Also called “devil’s tongue jelly,” konnyaku is more or less flavorless until it is simmered in broth, and so it is almost always part of a dish that has a flavorful broth or dressing. Besides soaking up the flavors of the broth, it provides an interesting textural element to stews and soups — for example, in the vegetable stew recipe below, you get soft vegetable, soft vegetable, soft vegetable, some fairly soft tofu, and then springy, resilient konnyaku.

The calorie label is a bit hard to believe: a 9 ounce (255 gram) package has only 30 calories, just 0.12 calories per gram, compared with a carbohydrate’s 4 calories per gram or a fat’s 9 calories per gram. The reason for this is fiber: the magic of konnyaku is that it form a resilient mass of fiber with nearly no starch, fat or protein.

Konnyaku is made from the root of the Amorphophallus konjac plant, which is peeled, boiled, and mashed, before a coagulant is added to cause the paste to set into a gel. Sometimes hijiki (a sea vegetable) is added for flavor, nutrition (calcium), and color. (The konnyaku in the photo above contains hijiki — the konnyaku noodles in the photo below do not.)

Food Data Visualization, Food History, Fruit

Which Country Grows the Most Avocados?

December 10, 2018 2 Comments

Avocado Production from 1961 to 2014 - Data from FAOSTAT

At the 2017 International Food Blogging Conference in Sacramento, one of the sponsors was Avocados from Chile¹, the avocado promotion agency from that nation. The logic behind their promotional efforts in California is sound:

United States avocado growers can’t meet growing U.S. demand
The California avocado harvest is typically between April and September
Chile is in the southern hemisphere, so the harvest is shifted by six months and runs from September to March²

Avocado toast photo by T. Tseng on Flickr CC-by 2.0 — Photo by T. Tseng on Flickr – CC-by 2.0

Which Country Grows the Most Avocados?

Avocados from Chile’s presence at the conference got me thinking: Who grows avocados? Where does Chile fit in? Is production from Chile on the upswing?

Fortunately, one of my favorite statistical databases — FAOSTAT — had the answers³ and Tableau Public made it fairly easy to tell the story with charts.

Art, Blogging

Bring Zing to Your Posts with Public Domain or Creative Commons Images

May 3, 2018 No Comments

Soon after I started blogging 10+ years ago, I learned about Creative Commons licenses, which some creators apply to their own work so it can be shared with certain restrictions (note that this blog is currently licensed with a CC BY-NC-SA 2.5, and my Flickr collection also has a CC license). After figuring out the mechanics, I started using CC-licensed items to add visual elements to my blog posts (the first CC image I used was a lovely black and white photo of a crow in flight from Mark Lorch’s collection for my random musings about a Los Angeles street). I continued to use Creative Commons art, mostly from Flickr, when I wanted a picture of a carrot, or a wheel of cheese, or something similarly relevant to my post.

As time went on, new collections of images appeared and I learned about existing collections, and started to use them as sources of the art for my blog. Eventually, however, my tastes changed slightly and I started being attracted to the ‘vintage’ material in the archives. I liked adding quirky or unusual images to my posts — instead of a picture of a finished dish that I was writing about, I’d include something from an old seed catalog or a fairy tale (as in my post about turnip pickles and turnip greens).

In the spirit of the Creative Commons, I’ll share a few of my favorite sources and list some of their good and bad characteristics: Flickr Commons, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CCSearch, Wellcome Collection image library, and Google Books/Hathi Trust.

Books, Food History

The Seven Kinds of Catsup (Ketchup) You’ll Meet in a 19th Century Cookbook

April 22, 2018 4 Comments

Mushroom Catsup (Ketchup) Ad from Mrs Beeton's book of household management

Woman stirring a saucepan on a stove, lithograph by Charles Philipon, from the Wellcome Collection — Lithograph by Charles Philipon, from the Wellcome Collection

As I’ve discussed before, in the olden days, catsup/ketchup was about much more than tomatoes. Cookbooks from the 18th and 19th century are ripe with recipes for catsup/ketchup that contain ingredients that are decidedly non-ketchup ingredients, like walnuts, anchovies, and oysters.

In the early 19th century cookbook The Cook’s Oracle, author William Kitchiner shares seven recipes for catsup ¹. He is a fan of DIY catsup, noting at the end of his mushroom catsup recipe that

What is sold for mushroom catsup, is generally an injudicious composition of so many different tastes, that the flavour of the mushroom is overpowered by a farrago of garlic, anchovy, mustard, shallot, beer, wine, spices, &c.
Ready made catsup is little better than a decoction of spice and water, with the grosser parts of the mushrooms all beaten up to a pulp.

Ingredients, Kitchen Tips

Save the Basil! A Tip to Keep It Fresh

April 2, 2018 18 Comments

(Updated with alternative method to preserve fresh basil)

Believe it or not, the bunch of Thai basil in the photo below is three or four weeks old (it’s been so long that I don’t remember). And yet it is almost as bright green and lush as it was on the day I bought it.

I don’t remember where I heard this tip, but since it works so well and it is basil season, it’s worth sharing.

Books, Food History

The Evolution of Recipe Writing Style

March 31, 2018 No Comments

Last time, I wrote about an important 19th century cookbook, The Cook’s Oracle, by William Kitchiner and noted that his book was published during an era of significant cookbook evolution¹. One of the most important was how recipes were written: the structure and style of recipes.

Books, Food History

Cookbook Author Rants about Cutting and Pasting in Cookbooks

March 18, 2018 2 Comments

The following Receipts [Ed. note: recipes] are not a mere marrowless collection of shreds, and patches, and cuttings, and pastings, from obsolete works, but a bona fide register of practical facts, accumulated by a perseverance not to be subdued, or evaporated, by the igniferous terrors of a roasting fire in the dog-days. The Receipts have been written down by the fireside “with a spit in one hand, and a pen in the other,” … the author submitting to a labour no preceding Cookery-Book-maker, perhaps, ever attempted to encounter; having eaten each Receipt, before he set it down in his book.

So rants William Kitchiner, in the preface of his 1817 The Cook’s Oracle ¹, a collection of cooking instructions and over 500 recipes for all types of foods.

Later in the preface, he continues his tirade:

Most of these books² vary but little from each other, except in the prefatory matter: cutting and pasting seem to have been much oftener employed than the pen and ink: any one who has occasion to refer to two or three of them, will find the receipts almost always “verbatim et literatim;” equally unintelligible to those who are ignorant of, and useless to those who are acquainted with, the business of the kitchen.

Yes, Dr. Kitchiner³ is passionate about his work and doesn’t think much of his contemporaries and predecessors. He backs up his claims with hundreds of pages of (supposedly) original content, clear writing, and fully tested recipes.

Baked Goods, Main Dishes

Torta Verde: a Savory Pie from Italy

March 4, 2018 9 Comments

Now and then a food magazine contains a recipe that becomes a standard my kitchen. Even more rarely, a single issue will contain two standards. The May/June 1998 issue of Saveur was one of those rarities, with two recipes that I have made many, many times and consider critical parts of my cooking repertoire.

The first is clafoutis;, a dessert of fruit embedded in a custard, a dessert I make a few times during the cherry and apricot season in the spring. Although it can be adapted to fall fruit like apples and pears, I haven’t tried those variations. The second is torta verde, a savory pie from the Liguria region of Italy. In this torta, a thin olive oil crust holds a mixture of Swiss chard, feta cheese, onion, potato and eggs. I probably make it once a month, all year round, especially before long domestic flights because it is superbly portable and has robust flavors that stand up to taste-killing aircraft cabins.

Food Data Visualization, Insects as Food

A Word Cloud For Insects as Food (Entomophagy)

February 28, 2018 No Comments

For a little while, I was collecting articles about Insects as Food. I thought it would be fun to feed them into a word cloud generator, so I piled the articles into a giant text file, made some small adjustments and pasted the text into one of the free on-line cloud generators. Initially, I used WordItOut because it was user friendly and allowed a good amount of creative control. For the 2018 update, I switched to Tableau Public after learning from Clearly and Simply how to make Word Clouds in Tableau.

The word cloud shown below was built using text from 33 articles (over 27,000 words) from a variety of mass-media sources like magazine articles, newspaper articles, blog posts at media websites, and trade publications. They aren’t a random sample of news coverage and are probably somewhat cricket heavy. Before submitting the text, I edited the source material to remove plurals from certain top-ranked words (e.g., crickets -> cricket, insects -> insect, etc.) and also removed many common words (the, and, him, her, etc.).

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