1 information only
A Recipe for
About Vanilla Beans
Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power. it is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits. |
| Baron Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) German chemist |
Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions in the brain as marijuana...The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two, but can't remember what they are. |
| Matt Lauer , on NBC's "Today" show, August 22, 1996 |
Herb Tip |
This Recipe for About Vanilla Beans is one of thousands in the Recipes-to-go Bean Cookbook.
We load up on oat bran in the morning so we'll live forever. Then we spend the rest of the day living like there's no tomorrow. |
| Lee Iacocca |
If you enjoy this About Vanilla Beans Recipe - you should enjoy the recipe collections you can find on the websites below:
When baking, follow directions. When cooking, go by your own taste. |
| Laiko Bahrs |
Fish, to taste right, must swim three times - in water, in butter, and in wine. |
| Polish Proverb |
This is a recipe for About Vanilla Beans from the recipe cookbook of Recipes-to-go (Bean)
Anyhow, the hole in the doughnut is at least digestible. |
| H.L. Mencken |
Research tells us fourteen out of any ten individuals likes chocolate. |
| Sandra Boynton |
He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise. |
| Henry David Thoreau |
Great eaters and great sleepers are incapable of anything else that is great. |
| Henry IV of France |
“That's something I've noticed about food: whenever there's a crisis if you can get people to eating normally things get better.” |
| Madeleine L'Engle (1918--) American author. |
I'm like old wine. They don't bring me out very often, but I'm well preserved. |
| Rose Kennedy, (1890-1995) family matriarch, on her 100th birthday, 1991 |
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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