Vanilla Bean Ice Cream

Vanilla has the curious distinction of being both the most popular flavor in the Western world and a byword for boring. This says more about our collective vocabulary than it does about vanilla, which is in fact one of the most complex flavoring agents known to gastronomy. A single vanilla bean contains over 250 different organic compounds, more than are found in wine. Calling someone "vanilla" as an insult reveals only that you've never tasted the real thing. The vanilla orchid, native to Mexico, was considered an aphrodisiac by the Aztecs, who added it to their chocolate drinks. The Spanish conquistadors brought it back to Europe, where it remained ruinously expensive until a twelve-year-old enslaved boy named Edmond Albius, working on the island of Réunion in 1841, discovered how to hand-pollinate the flower. Before Albius, vanilla beans could only be produced where the melipona bee lived, which is to say, only in Mexico. After Albius, vanilla plantations spread across the tropics, though the labor of pollination remained—and remains—entirely manual. This ice cream pays respect to that labor. Real vanilla bean paste flecks the cream with those iconic black seeds, and the flavor is anything but boring: warm, floral, slightly smoky, with caramel undertones that make you realize everything labeled "vanilla" at the supermarket has been lying to you.