Vanilla: Why We Use Nielsen-Massey Bourbon Vanilla Bean Paste

Vanilla flower with open pod

Most people assume vanilla is the safe choice. The plain one. The thing you reach for when you're not trying to be interesting.

Those people have never thought about where vanilla actually comes from.

We use Nielsen-Massey Bourbon Vanilla Bean Paste in our kitchen, and we're deliberate about that — the brand, the form, the sourcing. Here's the full story, because it's a better one than "it came in a brown bottle."

Vanilla has no business existing outside Mexico

The vanilla orchid (Vanilla planifolia) is native to Mexico. For centuries, the Totonac people of Veracruz were the only ones who grew it — and the only ones who knew how to pollinate it, because its one natural pollinator, a specific stingless bee, doesn't exist anywhere else on earth. The Spanish brought vanilla to Europe in the 1500s. Europe went crazy for it. And then spent three hundred years trying to grow it somewhere else, failing completely, because every orchid they planted never produced a pod. Beautiful plant. Zero fruit.

That changed in 1841 on the French island of Réunion, when a twelve-year-old enslaved boy named Edmond Albius figured out how to hand-pollinate the flower using a stick and a thumb. He discovered that the vanilla orchid's male and female parts are separated by a membrane — one small flap — and that if you lift it with a sliver of bamboo and press the two together, you get pollination. The whole operation takes about ten seconds per flower and has to happen the one day the blossom is open. Miss it and the pod doesn't form.

Every vanilla orchid grown outside Mexico is pollinated by hand. Every single one, flower by flower, one day at a time. That's been the method for 184 years.

The growing process is its own argument for the price

After pollination, the pod takes nine months to mature on the vine — and then it can't just be picked and used. Green vanilla pods have almost no flavor. The characteristic vanilla aroma only develops through a curing process: blanching, sweating, drying, and conditioning over four to six months. The entire process from planting to finished vanilla takes three years before the first harvest. A mature vine produces maybe a hundred pods per year.

Madagascar, where most of the world's vanilla now grows, has exactly the right climate for this. It's also why vanilla is catastrophically vulnerable to weather. In 2017, Cyclone Enawo tore through Madagascar's vanilla-growing regions. The harvest was devastated. Vanilla prices went from around $100 per kilogram to over $600 per kilogram inside of eighteen months — briefly more expensive by weight than silver. That spike is why you started noticing "vanilla flavor" on everything that used to say "vanilla."

To put that in context: vanilla is the second most expensive spice on the planet, after saffron. The 2017 spike didn't create that status — it just reminded everyone who'd forgotten.

Vanilla flavor and real vanilla are not the same thing

The compound that gives vanilla its flavor is vanillin. It's present in the bean, it's detectable by your nose and tongue, and it can be synthesized — from wood pulp, from clove oil, from petrochemicals. Synthetic vanillin tastes like vanilla the way a photograph of a sandwich tastes like lunch. It hits the same receptor. The resemblance stops there. Real vanilla has over 250 flavor compounds beyond vanillin — the ones that give it depth, warmth, and the thing that makes you keep tasting something after you've swallowed it.

When the label says "natural vanilla flavor," that usually means synthetic vanillin derived from a natural source. When it says "vanilla extract," there's alcohol-extracted real vanilla in there, but quality and concentration vary enormously. When it says "vanilla bean paste," you're getting the seeds, the pod material, and a more concentrated flavor than extract — along with those black specks that tell anyone eating your custard or buttercream that you didn't cut corners.

Why the paste, and why Nielsen-Massey

Paste over extract, for most of what we make: the flavor is more concentrated, the seeds are visible (which matters in a macaron shell or a vanilla buttercream), and you get better distribution throughout the batter. Extract is great for things where concentration and visual don't matter. Paste is better when they do.

Nielsen-Massey specifically because they use a cold-extraction process — no heat, which means the volatile aromatic compounds that make real vanilla interesting don't cook off during processing. Their Bourbon Vanilla uses beans from Madagascar and the Comoro Islands. The quality is consistent. When you're building a recipe on top of an ingredient, consistency in that ingredient is everything.

And here's the thing about vanilla specifically — and about chocolate, butter, the flour we source, all of it: when a recipe has very few ingredients, there's nowhere to hide. A macaron shell is almond flour, sugar, and egg whites. A vanilla buttercream is butter, egg whites, and sugar. A shortbread is flour, butter, and sugar. Three, four, five ingredients — that's it. Every single one of them shows up in the final flavor, undisguised. There's no sauce to mask the cheap butter, no spice blend to cover a weak vanilla. You either use the good stuff, or your customer tastes the place where the good stuff should have been. That's why we use Nielsen-Massey and not the brown jug on the discount shelf. It's also why we use real butter instead of shortening, Belgian chocolate instead of a coating, and flour we actually know the protein content of. When there's nothing to hide behind, you don't cut corners on the ingredients.

We've costed this out. Real Nielsen-Massey paste is not cheap. Neither are the macarons, the custards, and the buttercreams we put it in. That relationship is not a coincidence.

Twelve-year-old Edmond Albius changed the global vanilla supply with a stick and a thumb in 1841. The least we can do is use the good stuff.

—Chef Keegan and The Lakehouse Bakery Team