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A Recipe for
About Vanilla Beans
Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity. |
| Voltaire |
I've been on a constant diet for the last two decades. I've lost a total of 789 pounds. By all accounts, I should be hanging from a charm bracelet." |
| Erma Bombeck |
“In America we eat, collectively, with a glum urge for food to fill us. We are ignorant of flavour. We are as a nation taste-blind.” |
| a nation taste-blind.” M.F.K. Fisher |
This Recipe for About Vanilla Beans is one of thousands in the Recipes-to-go Bean Cookbook.
There's too much blood in my caffeine system. |
| Seen on a bumper sticker |
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Chowder breathes reassurance. It steams consolation. |
| Clementine Paddleford |
There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson |
This is a recipe for About Vanilla Beans from the recipe cookbook of Recipes-to-go (Bean)
Cheese - milk's leap toward immortality. |
| Clifton Fadiman |
Herb Tip |
High-tech tomatoes. Mysterious milk. Supersquash. Are we supposed to eat this stuff? Or is it going to eat us? |
| Annita Manning |
The ear tests words as the palate tastes food. |
| Job 34:3 |
To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. |
| Rev. 2:7 |
“Food for all is a necessity. Food should not be a merchandise, to be bought and sold as jewels are bought and sold by those who have the money to buy. Food is a human necessity, like water and air, it should be available.” |
| Pearl Buck (1892-1973) American Nobel Prize winning author. |
Information from the 1996 Old Farmer's Almanac, "What You Can Eat To
Achieve True Peace of Mind", by Ken Haedrich
The vanilla orchid is a member of the plant family known as
Orchidaceae and is the only orchid that produces edible fruit. The
beans grow on a thick vine that flourishes in warm, moist climates
within 25 degrees of the equator. The vanilla plant begins to bear
fruit when it is three or four years old. Eight to nine months after
pollination, the beans are golden yellow and ready for harvest and
curing.
It takes about five to six pounds of green, freshly picked vanilla
beans to make one pound of properly cured beans. There are basically
two ways to cure the beans: in the sun or over a fire. Using the
solar method, beans are spread in the hot sun by day and wrapped in
blankets and placed in wooden boxes by night. The sweating process is
repeated over and over for six months, until the beans have lost up
to 80 percent of their moisture content. This method produces
superior results and is used in Madascar, Mexico, the former Bourbon
Islands, Tonga, and Tahiti.
The wood-fire curing method, used in Indonesia and Bali, takes only
two or three weeks, but produces a dry, brittle bean with a smoky
flavor, generally considered inferior.
When you buy a vanilla bean at your market, the black, oily, smooth
pod you're buying is a cured bean. When you purchase a bottle of
pure vanilla extract, you're buying beans whose flavor components
have been dissolved in a solution of water and alcohol. By law, pure
vanilla extract must contain at least 35 percent alcohol by volume.
Anything less is labeled a flavor. Pure vanilla extracts come in a
variety of folds, or strengths. The Food and Drug Administration has
established that a fold of vanilla is the extractive matter of 13.35
ounces of vanilla beans to a gallon of liquid. Strong, pure extracts,
such as four-fold, are primarily used in mass food production.
What about imitation vanilla? ~----------------------------
Not only is pure vanilla expensive, but demand also far exceeds the
world's supply of the real thing. Stepping in to fill the void is the
chemist, who has come up with a variety of imitations made from
synthetic vanillin, the organic component that gives vanilla its
distinctive flavor and fragrance. Most synthetic vanillin is a
byproduct of the paper industry, made by cooking and treating
wood-pulp effluent. But since vanillin is only one of more than 150
flavor and fragrance compounds found in pure vanilla, the chemist has
yet to match the subtlety with which Mother Nature has endowed the
real thing.
How to tell a good bean when you see one.
Serves: 1
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