Crème Brûlée: Easy Step-by-Step Recipe
Pratos-especiais
Glossário Culinário
Vanilla
Vanilla is the spice extracted from the pods of the Vanilla orchid, with a sweet, creamy, unmistakable perfume. It is the most used flavoring in confectionery, present in puddings, custards, ice creams and batters, where it rounds out flavor and enhances the other ingredients without dominating.
Characteristics
The most common forms in the kitchen are:
- Vanilla bean: the dark pod with tiny seeds, intensely aromatic, used in milk and custard infusions.
- Natural extract: alcoholic maceration of the beans, practical and faithful to the original flavor.
- Essence: a more affordable, standardized version, good for everyday use.
- Vanilla sugar: sugar flavored with the bean, great for dusting and sweetening teas.
- Vanilla paste: concentrated, with visible seeds, ideal for pale custards.
Natural products slightly darken pale custards, while synthetic versions keep the color but have a simpler perfume.
Uses in the kitchen
Vanilla is essential in crème brûlée, manjar branco, milk pudding, curds, chantilly, ice creams and buttery cake batters. Infused in hot milk, it perfumes porridges, rice pudding and white brigadeiros. It pairs very well with chocolate, coffee, coconut, strawberry and caramel, and even appears in mild marinades for fish and in creamy drinks.
Substitutions
Among the forms, extract, essence and paste substitute for one another in most recipes, adjusting the dose to taste. The bean can be reused, washed and dried, in sugar to make vanilla sugar. If you have none at all, lemon zest, mild cinnamon or orange-blossom water perfume the dessert by another route, without imitating vanilla.
Fun facts
Vanilla needs hand pollination outside its region of origin, which explains the high price of the beans. To use a bean, split it lengthwise and scrape out the seeds with the tip of a knife. Add the extract off the heat or at the end of preparation, as prolonged boiling evaporates part of the aroma. Store beans in an airtight jar in a cool, dark place.
