We all love the subtle sweet smell of vanilla. In fact, a couple of years ago I heard that people selling their homes were encouraged to place some vanilla essence in a dish for an hour in the oven , to permeate the whole home with delicious wafts!
If you have enjoyed baking over the years you will be no stranger to using vanilla extract in a variety of desserts and baked goods. So when you came to cooking in line with your Nutritionhelp recommendations it would be thought that vanilla could easily be included in sugar-free custards and alternative puddings. Well it would, except…
Start looking at the ingredients of vanilla essence in supermarket aisles and whole food shop shelves, and you will be both surprised and disappointed to find that the majority of them contain sugar. Those that do not have sugar listed in the ingredients will have alcohol as a base for the essence, and again, on the Nutritionhelp sugar/yeast free protocol, even this small amount of alcohol should be avoided. Back in 1999, when Thorsons first published Erica White’s Beat Candida Cookbook, it was a completely different story, and sugar/alcohol-free vanilla extract was quite readily available, hence its inclusion in many of the dessert recipes.
By the time Erica came to revise and update the Beat Candida Cookbook in 2014, a good source of vanilla extract was so hard to find that we made the decision to leave vanilla out of the recipes and focus on the ‘sweet’ spices, such as cinnamon and nutmeg. Natural vanilla pods can of course be used when appropriate, e.g. splitting the vanilla pod and scraping out the seeds to add to ‘rice pudding’ variations, but this is not always suitable for some recipes.
So, it was with some delight (yes, I get excited about simple things!) that I found a product in my local supermarket that was completely new to me. The Madagascan Vanilla Grinder!
Some of you may have been using this form of vanilla for years, but because I rarely visit the baking aisle, this was the first time I had come across this product. Very simply, it contains dried pieces of vanilla pod, in a pot with a grinder lid, so you simply invert it and twist the cap, allowing tiny pieces of vanilla to fall into your baking or to top your porridge etc.
The only potential problem with this, for any who are battling intestinal yeast over-growth, is that the vanilla is dried, and dried products can tend to harbour unseen mould. Therefore, you may want use the dried vanilla bean cautiously, monitoring whether it has a negative impact on your progress. It would certainly be worth storing the grinder in the fridge to reduce likelihood of any mould developing.
Enjoy!
