Monday, February 25, 2008
From JR Mushrooms & Specialties
As an essential ingredient for making crème brûlée, vanilla ice cream, and many other dishes, nothing beats a quality vanilla bean. Some recipes call for splitting the bean and using only the tiny black vanilla seeds contained in the bean. Place used and dried vanilla beans in a few cupfuls of sugar. After a few days, you will have delicious vanilla sugar to use in your cookie and cake recipes.
I made a coconut cream pie for Thanksgiving dessert and decided "What the heck. Let's give cooking with the fresh beans a try." In addition to the vanilla extract called for in the recipe, I split a vanilla bean and scraped the seeds into the mixture. OMG! I have never tasted coconut cream pie this good. The only difference was the addition of the fresh vanilla. My BIL called the next day to rave about the pie AGAIN. I dropped the rest of the cut pod into a bottle of vodka (I'm using Tito's Handmade Vodka) and have continued to add pods as I use them in cooking. The extract isn't ready (it hasn't even been 1 month since I started it), but the smell is wonderful and the taste is well on the way to perfection. I'll definitely be buying fresh beans to use in my baking from now on.
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