All my life I’ve been a vanilla extract kind of baker. So was my mom, so were my grandmothers and so was my greatgrandfather. I don’t know about anyone before that but I’m going to assume earlier generations were too. That being said, I tried something new over the last few months and wanted to share my thoughts for those of you who are also considering this.
I’ve already admitted to watching cooking shows. I like to watch foreign cooking shows the most. There is nothing more entertaining than watching people whose language you don’t speak, cook in new ways, with ingredients you might not have seen before.
A couple months ago I was watching some english speaking nutjobs attempt to make american foods. It was ridiculous. However, they did use something called vanilla paste. I’d never heard of it so I looked it up. Then I checked my local stores. Only 1 store carried it and it was very not cheap. But I was intrigued so I bought one.
When I brought my order home and unpacked it I was shocked to see how small that jar was. For $13 USD I expected a bit more I guess. But it is a cute little jar.
The jar is half empty now as I’ve used it several times in different recipes. It gives a delightful light, clean vanilla taste to baked goods. Unfortunately I had to use twice as much of the paste as any recipe called for just to be able to taste it at all. So not only is it expensive to begin with but the cost literally doubled with having to use twice the amount. It does not taste better than the extract in my opinion, just different. I’ve never used actual vanilla beans as they cost even more and I have to pay attention to my budget. If I didn’t bake very often I could almost see using the paste but I bake all the time to keep my hubby in the sweets he adores so it’s not at all cost effective for me.
I did blind taste tests with my hubby by making 2 batches of whatever and not telling him which one used the paste or the extract. He couldn’t tell them apart but I could. I much prefered the dishes with the pure vanilla extract over the paste. It didn’t matter if it was a cake, a bar or a batch of cookies, the end result was always the same. The extract gave a better end product in my opinion.
While it is entirely possible that the only brand available to me is not a good one, I won’t be buying this again. I leave it to you to do this test for yourself. If you do I would love to hear your thoughts on how they compare.
Have a happy!
TT
Tiger Talks 