This year's vanilla harvest starting, and with the hot weather, moving fast. This year I'll harvest around 100 pods which I'll process into cured vanilla over the next few months.
It's also the time of year for "tipping", where you go through and break off the growing tips to hopefully induce flowering, which will start as early as October November. I'm going to be rooting and possibly even selling some vine material from the tipping events.
It's a tragedy that the word we adopted for "plain and boring" is an incredibly complex flavor derived from a difficult to cultivate tropical vine.
Vanilla is great
It's also basically "dessert MSG". It can go in almost anything and definitely makes it better.
I've though the same. It's because vanilla and vanilla-like flavors are often defaults
They’re really on defaults in America because vanilla flavoring a byproduct of the petroleum industry so it’s very very cheap. In many other countries, “milk” flavor is the default.