Just Vanilla?
As someone with no sense of smell (a condition known as anosmia) vanilla had always seemed like a cop-out on the countless other delicious desserts more richly decorated with colour and texture. Take away the famously decadent scent and what's left?
Regardless, I have since come to love its simplicity (especially when paired with milo!), and the world revolves around vanilla as the staple ingredient of more than 18,000 market products. However the majority of these products are actually flavoured with synthetic vanillin, the chemically engineered artificial cousin of vanilla which is 20 times cheaper and probably 200 times easier to produce!
Finding 'true' vanilla
Natural vanilla stems from the vanilla orchid native to Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Arguably first...