60-Second Video Tips: Vanilla Beans - Get Your Money's Worth

Vanilla beans are delightfully flavorful, but also delightfully expensive. America's Test Kitchen's John "Doc" Willoughby illustrates a sweet little trick to get every last bit of flavor from a split vanilla pod.

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America's Test Kitchen is a real 2,500 square foot test kitchen located just outside of Boston that is home to more than three dozen full-time cooks and product testers. Our mission is simple: to develop the absolute best recipes for all of your favorite foods. To do this, we test each recipe 30, 40, sometimes as many as 70 times, until we arrive at the combination of ingredients, technique, temperature, cooking time, and equipment that yields the best, most-foolproof recipe.

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[muncher]

I just used this tip while making my Vanilla Semifreddo; delicious!

[LittleAl]

Would table or coarse salt work in the same way as the sugar does in this video if the recipe in question calls for salt just as well as vanilla and sugar?

[cindydbc]

Anyone know how long they last n how do u know it isn't any good anymore?

[erswain]

What a great tip! Thank you very much. Now, if you would only tell me which is the best Vanilla Bean to many choices and I don't know how to choose the best one.

[stooge]

$8 apiece for vanilla beans? one word, my friends: ebay.

[madthumbs]

$8 ea? -lol! Why are you teaching people how to put a curl on the edge of their knife? If you must use a knife to scrape the seeds: at least use the back side of it.