Vanilla Guerilla
I use a lot of vanilla in my cooking. I use it to flavour cakes and muffins, Pannacotta, Fruit Tumblers, Pudding, Ice Cream, Creme Brullee or Pudim Flan, or to make vanilla-flavoured sugar for use with summer fruits and berries. Its not unusual that I should use two to four vanilla pods on a single weekend.
Even without the Madagascar vanilla crisis, I have always found the price for vanilla quite steep. Subject to its quality and origin, a single pod typically sells for £2…2.50 here in the UK supermarkets, and bargains are rare.
I had pretty much wasted two pods on a large portion of strawberry ice cream last week – wasted, because the strawberries had no aroma to speak of, and neither did the resulting ice cream. It wasn’t the vanilla’s fault, but it got me going. I am no cheapskate, but wasting over £5 of good vanilla on this unhappy ice cream annoyed me, and finally got me going on line.
Et voila! I have just taken delivery from Vanilla Mart, who sold me 20 premium pods (18-21 cm, thick and moist, smells wonderful) for a grand total of £8.50, P&P included. Ordered in the evening of day one, shipped on day two, received on day three.
The fool is me again, of course.
When something looks expensive and feels expensive, it probably is expensive. Supermarkets thrive from making the impression of providing a bargain, but an alert common sense is still required. I admit partial failure, and am glad that I have now overcome the Vanilla rip-off.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=30f957fa-9e3c-4950-861f-f09749ddf5ff)
oooh, good recommendation on the vanilla mart! I take it the vanilla has turned out to be as lovely as it seemed? We don’t use a great deal of vanilla, purely because of the price, but we do always have vanilla sugar on the go- the original vanilla pod we split for it about a year ago is still going strong and flavouring up the sugar something lovely- and we do go through buckets of that!
Helen,
the vanilla mart pods that I bought are just fine. Maybe they could have an even stronger aroma, but they certainly are much better than some of the supermarket stuff at four times the price (and higher). I recall some pods from Tesco being completely dried out and a complete waste of money; these here are nice and thick and moist – and going as quick as your sugar…
Thanks for stopping by.