How do you add vanilla flavor to your recipes?

You have bought vanilla flavouring to make delicious preparations, but are not sure how to incorporate it into your cakes and other creams? This article explains how to measure vanilla flavoring according to your recipe!

Very easy to use, the food flavors subtly perfume your culinary preparations. Among the most popular food flavors are coffee, lemon, strawberry, bitter almond... and especially vanilla flavoring, which is much more economical than real vanilla beans. One drop too many or too few can nevertheless be enough to disappoint you! Here are a few tips on how to best dose this vanilla flavoring, whatever your recipe.

A particular dosage according to the preparation

Vanilla flavouring is commonly used in sweet recipes - in ice cream or frozen preparations, in pastries and in dairy products, especially in yoghurts and yoghurt drinks. So we will first focus on these three categories of products. Generally speaking, vanilla flavouring is quite concentrated, which is why you should use between 2 and 5% of your total preparation. At Nerolian, the specialists recommend specific dosages for each set: to make smooth, subtly flavored ice creams, start with 3%. Thus, for 20 cl of ice cream, you will incorporate 120 drops of flavouring, i.e. 6 ml. The same goes for dairy products. The dose is slightly higher for pastry, with an optimal dosage of 4%. For 200 grams of preparation, you can incorporate 160 drops of vanilla flavoring, or 8 ml.

All your recipes for cookies (shortbread, macaroons, madeleines, muffins...), baked goods (brioches, pancakes, waffles or pancakes), cakes (yoghurt, flans, quadruplets...) and other fruity desserts - baked apples, flambéed bananas... - will be better with a few drops of vanilla flavor! You can also spice up your hot chocolates and other coffees with your flavoring, making sure to respect the dosage for dairy products. Remember also that the more your preparations are going to cook, the more you have to intensify the flavour. If your cakes, pies and other desserts are going to be baked at a high temperature, you will also need to increase the amount of flavoring! For example, if you use Neroliane vanilla flavor, the amount of flavor will vary between 3 and 5% for your baked goods, while the proportion in dairy and ice cream will vary between 2.5 and 3.5%.

Flavor combinations

Within a single recipe, you can also combine several flavors. Vanilla flavouring can be used in savoury recipes, in combination with sweet almond, cardamom or hazelnut flavouring. In this case, it will be necessary to decrease the dosage of each flavour, tasting your preparations as you go along. It is possible to integrate essential oils, such as those of pink berries or black pepper, which are a treat associated with vanilla. In your desserts, try associations such as vanilla flavor-cocoa flavor, vanilla flavor-mimosa flavor ...

Choose natural vanilla flavors

For an optimal result, opt for a natural vanilla flavor. According to European legislation, a natural flavor is produced by concentration, distillation, extraction, fermentation or roasting of a vegetable raw material. You can find all kinds - and all qualities - online, in supermarkets and in some specialty stores. Opting for a natural vanilla flavoring ensures that your flavoring is composed of at least 95% vanilla molecules, such as vanillin.