The Vanilla Bean

I don't know about you, but I've always looked at recipes that called for vanilla beans, and dismissed them as "too fussy." Vanilla beans are expensive, and often hard to find. (I think maybe my local Fred Meyer may carry them nowadays, but that's a pretty recent development.)

The instructions always sounded so nebulous, too: "Split open the vanilla bean with the tip of a sharp knife, and scrape out the seeds with the flat of the blade." Why did I need a sharp knife? How sharp? Could I use my fingers to scrape out the seeds? Was there some special mechanic about the sharp knife and the blade that was required for this sort of thing?

Last spring I taught a special topics class, "Chemistry in the Kitchen", and while teaching that class I purchased a vanilla bean for use in the class. As luck would have it, I never ended up using it in cooking during the class, and I remembered that as I was reading a recipe in Molly Wizenberg's "A Homemade Life", which my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas. The recipe was "Vanilla Bean Buttermilk Cake with Glazed Oranges and Creme Fraiche". It does sound kind of fussy, doesn't it? Do you stock creme fraiche in your fridge? What the heck is creme fraiche, anyway? Well, I knew what creme fraiche was -- also on account of the class I taught last spring, and I did happen to have it. And I had buttermilk. And last week my son decided he wanted egg whites for breakfast. Three of them, it turned out -- cooked one at a time. Hey -- eggs are good for you, so I wasn't going to complain. But that meant I had three egg yolks in the fridge, and I'd been trying to figure out what to do with them. So...I remembered this recipe. I probably shouldn't re-print it here, since she just published the book...

It's actually kind of funny -- with all of these relatively unusual ingredients at hand (like creme fraiche and a vanilla bean) -- the main impediment for me to make this recipe was that I didn't have any cake flour. Now, I know that cake flour has less protein in it than other flours, so I did a bit of reading in "CookWise", by Shirley Corriher, and figured that I could probably just substitute some of the flour with cornstarch. So I did, and I hope it works!

But back to the vanilla bean. Like a good scientist, I followed Molly's directions, and split the vanilla bean length-wise. What a thing of beauty -- a vanilla bean is packed full of these tiny, black, lustrous seeds. They're kind of like poppy seeds, only smaller, blacker, and shinier -- pretty much more appealing in every way, especially because they smell heavenly. And as directed, I used the side of the knife (and the tip, because it seemed appropriate) to scrape out all those gorgeous seeds. Well...most of them. They do stick to the inside of the pod. The pod I buried in some sugar, also as suggested by Molly. In a couple of months I'll see how it turned out.

The cake is in the oven. It, too, smells heavenly. I'm not sure if I'm going to bother with the glazed oranges, mostly because I don't have any large oranges. Satsumas, yes. Navel oranges, no. I don't think I want to fiddle with little ones. I might make a lemon glaze for it, though.


Footnote: In case you're not familiar with it, vanilla beans come from the vanilla orchid, Vanilla planifolia. I'm a big fan of orchids. I've been an orchid enthusiast since I bought my first dendrobium, around 15 years ago. While I was in college I had a V. planifolia, which grew fairly well for quite some time, but never bloomed, to my significant disappointment. It wasn't that I was hoping it would produce vanilla beans, and I wouldn't have to buy them; it was just that I thought it would be extremely special if I could see a real vanilla orchid make a real vanilla flower. I've never lived anywhere tropical, so I haven't seen them in the wild or anything. (Anyway, I think it languished when I started moving across the country, and otherwise neglecting most/all of my plants. Too bad. Maybe I'll get another, now that I'm settled.)