3. Vanilla: The Baking Ingredient That Comes From an Orchid
The word vanilla gets used to mean plain or ordinary, which is a little unfair to the plant. Natural vanilla comes from the fruits of an orchid. Instead of a small plant in a decorative pot, imagine a climbing vine with fleshy leaves and long green pods.
Those pods are often called vanilla beans, but they are not beans in the pea-and-bean family. They are orchid fruits containing tiny seeds. The green pods on the plant also look quite different from the dark, flexible vanilla pods sold for baking.
The transformation takes work after harvest. Curing develops the familiar aroma and darkens the pods. Pollination is another demanding step: growers commonly pollinate the flowers by hand to obtain fruit. That small bottle in the baking cupboard has a surprisingly botanical backstory, starting with an orchid flower and ending only after careful handling of its fruit.
