![]() When shopping for high-quality vanilla extract, check the ingredients list to ensure you’re looking at a very simple mixture: just water, alcohol, and vanilla bean extractives. The resulting brew is highly concentrated and deeply flavorful, ready to be deployed into cookie doughs, cakes, frostings, and more. Vanilla extract is made from vanilla beans that are cured and soaked in a solution that helps to draw out the complex notes. If you have one form of vanilla in your house, it’s probably this one: the most ubiquitous in recipes, easiest to find in stores, and least expensive-at least in terms of all-natural vanilla. Read on for some background on each vanilla-based ingredient, plus a few of Epi’s favorite brands to shop for in each category. It might be time for a primer on all of the forms the flavor can take, including vanilla paste, powder, sugar, and yes, the fragrant, dark brown extract that seems to pop up in every sweet recipe (and some savory ones too). But do you really know what it is you’re dutifully measuring out, teaspoonful by teaspoonful, into all your cookies and cakes? ![]() Vanilla is a pantry essential: If you ever even think about baking, you’re likely have a bottle of the extract in your kitchen. Also, depending on the variety of vanilla you use-the species of plant, where it was grown-it can take on a number of slightly different flavors, from creamy and light to robust and boozy. Without it, baking projects tend to taste flat and uninspired. Like salt, vanilla enhances the other ingredients in a recipe chocolate, coffee, brown sugar, and eggs (in custards and puddings) all shine a little brighter when vanilla is around. To the casual vanilla consumer, this may seem like overkill, but real vanilla heads know that, despite the word becoming synonymous with boring or basic, the flavor is deeply complex. Bon Appétit loves its "visual pop," and touts among its many attributes, its easy measuring, and storage capabilities (up to two years via McCormick Science Institute) and points out that ground vanilla bean powder's magic goes well beyond baked goods, encouraging its use in "ice cream bases, puddings, custards, and any other dessert that requires heating.At Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream in New York City, there are notably a ton of vanilla options on the menu-at the time of this writing, seven to be exact. Though extracts work wonderfully in baking, when you want to kick that vanilla flavor up, many turn to vanilla bean paste or the caviar scraped from the whole beans. But if you truly want vanilla to take center stage in your recipe, it's pure ground vanilla bean powder that will really make your vanilla sing. Vanilla extracts are just that, an extracted flavor of the vanilla bean, either in an alcohol or glycerine base that often dissipates in intensity once placed in the high heat of the oven (via Martha Stewart). ![]() Because pure vanilla bean powder is a single-ingredient product, the flavor and scent are both more pronounced going into your baked goods. This is why, though fairly new to the consumer marketplace, food manufacturers have been using vanilla bean powder over extracts for years (via JL Gourmet Imports).ĭepth of flavor is the main reason to use vanilla powder. These powders work well when sprinkled on finished baked goods, mixed into frostings, or when you need to retain the color purity of your recipe but it won't get you the deep, rich flavor that comes from ground, sun-dried, and cured, mahogany-colored vanilla bean pods (via Smithsonian Magazine). Instead, they are a variety of different sugar and/or starch combinations that have been sprayed with extracts of vanilla and mixed with anti-caking agents to produce an affordable, easy-to-use vanilla powder (via JL Gourmet Imports and Singing Dog Vanilla). The more commonly found white or beige powders labeled "vanilla powder," (though they were introduced to the consumer first) are not true, pure ground vanilla bean powder. But if you've been paying attention, you might be asking yourself, "Why is vanilla powder white?" The simple answer is - it's not.
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