The Kitchen · nine recipes worth the bean

The Kitchen · № 08

Vanilla sugar, and vanilla salt

Nothing is wasted. The spent pod has a second life, and the French have known it for centuries.

Makes
500 g
Work
5 min
Ready
2 weeks
Cost
Nothing

Where this comes from

Sucre vanillé is not a trick. It is a fixture of the French kitchen, sold in sachets in every supermarket there and made at home for centuries from the pod you have already used. A scraped pod still holds most of its aromatics: the seeds take the credit, but the pod carries the perfume.

Vanilla salt is the savoury sibling of the same idea, and it is a good deal younger. We include both because a bean you paid properly for should be used twice.

Sucre vanillé: traditional French kitchen practice

Ingredients

  • 2 to 3 spent Ox & Orchid vanilla pods, already scraped and used
  • 500 g caster sugar, for the sugar
  • or 200 g flaky sea salt, for the salt
  • Two jars with tight lids

Method

  1. After you have scraped a pod for a custard, rinse it under cold water and dry it completely. Completely: any moisture left and the jar clumps, or worse.

  2. Leave the pods somewhere warm and dry for a day, or give them 20 minutes in an oven on its lowest setting with the door ajar, until they are brittle.

  3. For the sugar: bury the whole dry pods in the sugar, seal the jar, and leave it two weeks. Shake it when you pass it. Top the sugar up as you use it and one jar runs for a year.

  4. For the salt: grind the dry pods with a spoonful of the salt in a spice grinder or a mortar until you have a dark powder, then stir that through the rest of the flakes. Do not grind all of it; you want flakes, not dust.

  5. The sugar goes into crêpes, madeleines, an apple tart, or a plain yoghurt. The salt goes onto beef fat, roast carrots, dark chocolate, or the rim of a glass.

  6. Neither is a substitute for the bean. Both are what you owe it.

The grader’s note

A word on honesty, since this page is built on it. Vanilla salt will not make anything taste of vanilla, and it should not. What it does is take the edge off salt, the way a bay leaf takes the edge off a stock. If you want vanilla to be the flavour, use a pod. This is what you do with the pod afterwards, and it is the whole difference between a kitchen that respects an expensive ingredient and one that throws half of it away.

Made with

Grade A Indonesian planifolia.

Every recipe here is written for a real bean: graded, signed, and sold by weight.

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