The other day I was bemoaning the cost of real vanilla extract and vanilla beans, and a friend sent me a link to this Cooks Illustrated article.  It turns out that professional bakers cannot distinguish between the use of real vanilla extract and the cheap artificial stuff in a baked item.  

(First we learn that wine connoisseurs cannot distinguish between expensive and cheap wines in double blind tests, and now this?)

Real vanilla contains hundreds of different compounds that contribute to its taste and smell.  However, artificial vanilla contains only one, the strongest note, vanillin.  It turns out that when you bake vanilla, all of those other compounds get burned away by the heat.  The only one that remains is - you guessed it - vanillin.  

In a sense, once you bake something, the heat of your oven turns genuine vanilla extract into the cheap artificial stuff. In fact, simply adding vanilla to a warm dish (as the Cooks Illustrated staff found when they added it to pudding which had been taken off the stove, but had not cooled) will also drive off some of the flavors.  That's a little demoralizing, isn't it?!

The good news is that real vanilla still does have a place at the table.  Cooks Illustrated concluded with the advice that the real stuff is best for uses which include little to no heat, such as buttercream frosting, no-cook ice cream, and pastry cream.

Vanilla is expensive because, much like saffron, it is all cultivated by hand.  (Saffron is the world's most expensive spice, but vanilla is the second runner-up.)  The vanilla seed pod comes from an orchid which has to be hand-pollinated.  Once the seed pod has formed, it has to be hand picked.  And after that is has to be cured, which can take several months.  You can't rush real vanilla!

The vanilla orchid is native to Mexico, and as delicious and popular as it was, it remained there for many centuries.  In the wild, the vanilla orchid is pollinated only by a particular kind of bee (found only in Mexico, naturally).  Eventually someone figured out how to hand pollinate the vanilla orchid, and its cultivation spread to other tropical parts of the world.  The most common variety of vanilla orchid is grown in Madagascar, although connoisseurs like to sample vanilla beans from other regions to compare their flavor.

You can easily make your own vanilla extract at home.  All you need is vanilla beans, vodka, and time!  At least two months according to the recipe I found here.  It keeps almost indefinitely, but it's difficult to say whether or not it will save you money, since neither vodka nor vanilla beans are exactly cheap.  However, it's fun to do, and arguably better than the mass-produced stuff.

One thing I didn't know before I read the Cook's Illustrated article is that vanilla is a "flavor potentiator," which "boosts our perception of sweetness."  It works a bit like salt in that respect, enhancing the other flavors rather than providing a flavor of its own (until you use too much, of course).

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user kendiala