vanilla bean

The whole cured pod of Vanilla planifolia, an orchid, and the library has one recipe that starts from a bean: the alcohol-free vanilla extract. One pod is split lengthwise and sliced thin across, so the seeds and pod are exposed. A teaspoon each of food-grade glycerin and distilled water is warmed in a vial lowered into water at about 60°C, and the pod is stirred in. Then it sits sealed in a dark cupboard at room temperature, shaken every few days, for at least three months. Glycerin is a gentler solvent than alcohol, the recipe says, so the vanillin and the pod's softer floral notes come out slowly. The extract goes into the egg-free brownies and the protein oat waffles.

The Journal's note on the orchid that needed a thumb explains the price. A vanilla flower opens for roughly one day, and in nature only one flower in a hundred to one in a thousand sets fruit, so each pod is hand-pollinated: a trained worker does one to two thousand flowers a day. Then curing takes three to six months in four stages, killing, sweating, drying and conditioning, and a green pod has essentially no smell.

In the living pod, vanillin sits as glucovanillin, kept apart from the enzyme that would release it, and killing breaks that separation. The Journal's note on water activity gives the figures: a fresh green pod is 11.38 per cent glucovanillin and 0.21 per cent vanillin, and classical curing yields 1.1 to 1.8 grams of vanillin per 100 grams of dry pod, well under half of what the glucoside theoretically holds. A cured bean also carries a couple of hundred other aroma compounds, guaiacol and acetovanillone among them, and the note calls that the actual chemical reason a bean and pure vanillin are not the same experience.