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Well, it is now November and very soon I will be grabbing out my recipe box to start in with making cookies and candies for my holiday trays. I love to bake and am always on the lookout for tasty recipes, cool gadgets and new ingredients to add to my ever growing collection! I was recently contacted by Nielsen Massey to try out their new vanilla bean paste and I will be honest in saying this stuff is amazing! If you are not familiar with Nielsen Massey, here is a little bit about them from their website:
Nielsen-Massey Vanillas. The finest pure vanilla in the world! How do we stake such a claim? It starts with a family dedicated to pure vanilla products since 1907. Add the finest vanilla beans available – hand-picked for perfection, and the process has begun. Next, an exclusive cold extraction process slowly and gently draws the delicate and distinctive flavor from the vanilla beans. The result is the finest pure vanilla in the world — perfect for the home cook or the discriminating chef.
Nielsen-Massey offers a number of different types of vanilla products like pure vanilla extract, vanilla powder, vanilla paste, organic vanilla or whole vanilla beans. They also offer other pure flavor extracts like coffee, chocolate, almond, orange and many others. These make great additions to cookie and candy recipes!
For my review, I received a bottle of their Madagascar Bourbon Pure Vanilla Bean Paste. (shown above left) This is a pure vanilla with natural vanilla bean seeds in a unique, convenient, paste form. Did you ever buy a really high quality vanilla ice cream and see those tiny flecks of black vanilla bean seeds in it? THAT is what is different about this paste as compared to a traditional extract. No more simmering the whole vanilla bean pod and scraping out the seeds to get that intense vanilla flavor!
So, can you see the actual vanilla beans in my pictures? I made homemade Bourbon Vanilla Icecream a couple weeks ago and it turned out amazing! I replaced the vanilla extract with the Madagascar Bourbon Pure Vanilla Bean Paste and the final ice cream had such a wonderful gourmet look to it.
This vanilla bean paste was a 2011 sofi Gold Winner for the NASFT sofi awards in the “Baked goods, baking ingredient or cereal” category. Clearly, I am not the only person impressed with this product! Just use 1 TBSP of this vanilla bean paste in place of 1 TBSP of vanilla extract. It is the same as using one vanilla bean pod in your recipe.
Overall, a wonderful product that not only adds a rich, vanilla flavor to your recipe but also gives it a very elegant and sophisticated look! You can’t really see it in the picture but the ice cream itself really does show off those tiny little vanilla bean seeds and the flavor was amazing! Click the link in the paragraph above if you want to check out the recipe!
My thanks to Nielsen-Massey for allowing me to review their products. If you would like to learn more about them, you can check them out on Facebook!
Disclaimer: As per FTC guidelines, I received product samples in exchange for my honest review. I received no monetary compensation. All opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone.
Diane is a professional blogger and nationally certified pharmacy technician at Good Pill Pharmacy. She earned her BS in Microbiology at the University of New Hampshire and has worked in cancer research, academics, and biotechnology. Concern over the growing incidence of human disease and the birth of her children led her to begin living a more natural life. She quickly realized that the information she was learning along the way could be beneficial to many others and started blogging and freelance writing to share this knowledge with others. Learn more about her HERE.
That ice cream looks yummy!! I have never tried cooking with a vanilla paste.
Yum! Looks delicious. The label on the little bottles make me want to buy them.
WOW, this sounds great. Glad to learn about it just in time for all the holiday baking!
Mmmm, I can only imagine how good that tastes. Thanks for sharing, my mom and I are going to do our holiday baking so I’ll have to try this out!
love their vanilla!!!!
Quality vanilla means everything in a recipe–these look like great products….and that ice creams sounds incredible!
I love it when you can see those little black specs in vanilla ice cream!
I’ve never used vanilla paste before – I love to cook & bake, so this would be something fun to try!
Wow that looks delish! I actually have used Neilsen before and I love the quality of their Vanilla!