Wholemeal Crank

Why can't she eat peanut butter? If she has a severe or life-threatening peanut allergy, I'd be very careful about trying cashews. An allergist told me once that if he has a patient who is allergic to one nut, he cautions them about eating other nuts that they aren't allergic to because often they're processed in a facility that also uses the nut they are allergic to. So if you were allergic to walnuts, but not pecans, he recommended not eating any commercially processed nuts, but it was ok to eat pecans you'd shelled yourself, since you knew they weren't contaminated with walnuts. And the way cashews grow, I don't think you can get them "unshelled" like that. At the very least, I agree that you should buy the whole cashews yourself, since you might recognize any peanuts that happened to fall into the cashews, which you can't do once they're turned into butter.

If you're going to strain out the zest anyway, why not just use lemon oil to start with, and skip the straining step?

I've found a huge difference in most spices when I mill the whole spice in with my grains rather than using powders, and on the assumption that it might work the same for vanilla, I have started doing it regularly. I also bought a lot of vanilla pods when the prices were lower a year ago, and need to do something with them.... For some recipes it has worked beautifully. But the results have seemed a little uneven and I wasn't always using the same conversion of inches of bean to volume extract. As for pod flavor vs. seed flavor, since vanillin crystals are said to sometimes coat the pod, I'd rather not toss the pod. I've nibbled on the pods and found them to have a little flavor. At worst, it just adds a little fiber to the mix, not a problem when it is milled to a very fine flour. And the problem with vanilla.com is probably specific to my campus network. It can be pretty capricious in cutting off web servers.

I just saw this thread, and didn't see anyone bring this point up: how much of the wonderfulness is from the setting: they're IN FRANCE?! The atmosphere probably adds something, hey? (said from the ignorant perspective of one who has not been there myself YET!)

2 or 3 tsp per bean sounds more like it....I'm glad you caught my mis-reading. And the vanilla.com web site sounds interesting, but I can't get it to load. It starts loading and stalls over and over. Anyone else have this problem?

So one bean is one tsp vanilla? That seems like an awful lot of vanilla bean. Thanks for the reply.

this may have already been discussed, but searching I find either hundreds of entries (like for "vanilla bean" + "vanilla extract") or none ("vanilla bean substitute" or "vanilla bean equivalent"). My apologies if I missed the relevant post. I've switched to using mostly vanilla beans in my cooking and baking, wherever possible milling the beans right in with the wheat berries for flour in baked goods. But I haven't seen a detailed discussion anyplace of how much bean is roughly equivalent to how much vanilla extract. I presume that details matter, such as whether you've got high-quality beans with the vanilla crystals on the outside (nope, mine are nice plump shiny pods without any crystal frosting) and whether you're comparing to gourmet extracts vs. standard retail brands (like the McCormick or Schilling or store brand extracts I used before starting with the beans). I tend to use about 1/2 inch of bean for each tsp of vanilla called for in the recipe. Any comments appreciated. Thanks!