Ingredient

Vanilla

Vanilla is the second most expensive spice in the world after saffron, because the orchid it comes from must be pollinated by hand and the pods cured over months. That cost is why so much of what is sold as vanilla is not.

The forms

Pods (beans)

The whole cured fruit. Best flavour, and the seeds give the visible black specks. Expensive and worth it where vanilla is the point.

Extract

Pods steeped in alcohol. The everyday choice, good in baking, and the alcohol carries the flavour well.

Paste

Extract thickened with seeds. Gives the specks without the pod, and is convenient. Usually the best value.

Essence or "vanilla flavouring"

Usually synthetic vanillin, one compound out of the several hundred in real vanilla. Cheap, one-dimensional, and recognisably different.

Vanilla sugar

Sugar stored with a used pod. Free, and excellent.

Powder

Ground dried pods. Good where liquid would be a problem — in a dry mix or a meringue.

Getting everything out of a pod

1. Lay the pod flat and slice it lengthways with the tip of a small sharp knife.
2. Open it out and scrape the seeds from both halves with the back of the knife.
3. Use the seeds in the recipe.
4. Do not throw the pod away. Put it into the milk or cream you are infusing — the pod itself holds a great deal of flavour, arguably more than the seeds.
5. Rinse and dry a used pod and bury it in a jar of caster sugar. In a fortnight you have vanilla sugar, and the pod keeps working for months.
6. Or steep several used pods in vodka or rum to make your own extract.

Using it well

• Infuse it in something warm and fatty. Vanilla compounds dissolve far better in fat and alcohol than in water, so warm cream or milk extracts far more than a watery mixture.
• Give it time. Twenty minutes off the heat in warm milk extracts more than a brief boil.
• Add extract at the end of cooking where you can. It is volatile and prolonged heat drives it off.
• A pinch of salt makes vanilla taste more of itself, as it does with most things.
• It works in savoury cooking too — with white fish, shellfish, carrots and cauliflower — in very small amounts.
• Vanilla makes other things taste sweeter without adding sugar, which is genuinely useful.

Buying and storing

• Pods should be plump, flexible and slightly oily, not dry and brittle. A dry pod has lost much of its oil.
• Madagascan (Bourbon) is the classic creamy vanilla; Tahitian is more floral; Mexican is spicier. All are good.
• Store pods in an airtight jar in a cool dark cupboard, not the fridge, where they can go mouldy.
• Extract keeps almost indefinitely; the alcohol preserves it.
• A dry pod is not wasted — steep it in cream or bury it in sugar.
• Check the label. "Vanilla flavouring" and "vanilla essence" are usually synthetic; "vanilla extract" is not.

Common questions