Purity Vanilla Extract

What is a Vanilla Extract?

Vanilla extract has in recent years become an essential ingredient in every discerning kitchen's larder. It is commonly known that extract is a superior product to 'essence' which is a chemically synthesised product and that extract is a convenient way of including the true flavours of the vanilla pod to your cooking.

The idea of an extract is to take out the flavour from the vanilla pod and make it into a more versatile form: a liquid. This means that the pod does not need to be cooked with in order to extract the flavour from them. This makes it possible to use them quickly in normal baking but also possible to use it in hot drinks like coffe or hot chocolate.

How it is made Traditionally?

The process of creating vanilla extract is hundreds of years old and has not changed much in that time. The extract is distilled through alcohol (sometimes in a pressurised vat) to extract the constituent components from the vanilla pod and leads to a brown liquid in an alcohol substrate that we commonly see today. Some manufacturers burn off as much alcohol that they can and mix the resulting product into an invert sugar base.

The Problem

However, what many people find is that an extract is only an approximation of the flavour profile that the original vanilla pod has. This is only as expected as the process relies on alcohol dissolving the compounds that are in the pod. Many of these compounds do not actually contribute to the flavour of the pod, for example the pod pigmentation which makes the extract brown. So we find that those chefs, manufacturers and discerning home cooks who want to get the true flavour profile of the pod will still choose to use a pod or an untainted powder to meet their requirements which takes time - and time is money!

Our Solution

Fairly recently a new patented technology had been invented which allowed for an extraction process to be run on spices which created a completely pure, unadulterated extract with no by-products. It allowed for more of the flvour from the spice to be extracted and for the distillate to evaporate completely at the end as it was a gas at room temperature. This initial extract is the most concentrated and purest extraction in the world, but it was not cheap... It required a multi-million pound plant and specialist staff to run it and control the process.

We teamed up with a specialist company that does this extraction for vanilla pods and have been working with them for over a decade in fine-tuning the process and costs to produce our range of specialist extracts which we call Purity Extracts.

First the vanilla pods are passed through liquified carbon dioxide through it. This happens in bespoke vats in a process that is carefully controlled to extract significantly more of the flavours from the pods and less of the components that are not required. The result is a pure vanilla extract that is extremely concentrated which we formulate into our Purity extract by combining with invert sugar in a carefully controlled process. This formula and manufacturing process is unique to Vanillabazaar so you cannot find this product elsewhere (unless we supplied it to them!).

This extraction process has:

• A significantly better flavour profile than standard extract
• Has ingredients that come only from the original pod, and invert sugar
• Gives excellent value for money when taking account the vanillin content per £

The Purity extract comes in:

• Organic/Non Organic
• Standard/Intense (double) strength
• WIth or without seeds (to give the effect of having used pods)