Kitchen experiment: vanilla

At the same time that we purchased our jar of Ceylon cinnamon, we also picked up a bottle of Mexican vanilla extract.  I'd tried a Mexican vanilla ice cream at a shop in San Antonio which delivered a slightly different taste from most vanilla ice creams, so I figured, why not try the Mexican vanilla extract if offered the opportunity?

I used the same method as when we tried the two different types of cinnamon: two batches of 1/3 of a recipe of rice pudding, though this time I was able to do my as-close-as-two-people-can-get-to-a-double-blind-experiment design.  I made the puddings, assigned a number to each extract (1 for Madagascar vanilla, and 2 for Mexican vanilla), then labeled the bowls by number.  After dinner, Dom set the de facto order in which we each tried the puddings.

If I'd read the recipe more carefully, I would have seen that I could have made a single pot of rice pudding, then split the cooked pudding in half before adding the extracts.  Well, what's one more pot to wash, I suppose?

Turns out I tasted Pudding 1 first, and Dom tasted Pudding 2.  After testing each one, we determined that though we liked the pudding we had each tried first, there was not much of a difference in the taste; the taste difference was markedly less than the difference for the two cinnamon varieties that we own.  The following day, we switched it up: Dom tasted Pudding 1 first, and I tasted Pudding 2, though this time we probably introduced bias in that we knew which ones we were tasting first.  Interestingly, we again liked whichever pudding we had tried first.  Our results were more or less inconclusive since the difference between the two vanillas was too subtle for us, but we both agreed that we liked actual the rice pudding better without having cooked the cinnamon in it!  Just a sprinkling of cinnamon on top is all that we might need.

We wondered if by the time a flavoring reaches the extract stage and is then used to flavor something else, most of the nuances of the original flavor are lost, such that Mexican vanilla extract in cooked or baked goods tastes more or less the same as Madagascar or Tahitian vanilla extract in the same situation.  I would think it would be a different matter if, for example, one used the actual vanilla bean to flavor an ice cream or rice pudding.  Perhaps that should be a future experiment!




Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 820: once again, we used the "stovetop rice pudding", not the "baked rice pudding".