Vanilla bean paste from Porter Foods

Porter Foods, who specialise in the “Finest foods from around the world” stock a plethora of exotic products. Award winning relishes and curry sauces, wild hibiscus flowers to add extra glamour to Champagne, luxury Cornish and Mediterranean sea salts, and all manner of luxury truffles and oils and chocolates. They also stock ingredients for cooking, such as goose fat, and vanilla.

We tried out their vanilla bean paste in a fairy cake mix. A box of Porter Foods’ vanilla bean paste contains four sachets of paste, each of which is equivalent to one pod of vanilla. It’s a great idea. Preparing vanilla can be quite intricate and laborious work. This is a time-saving product that will speed up your cake making.

There is really nothing it can be faulted for. You can see the little vanilla seeds sticking to the inside of the sachet before it has even been opened. You can smell the sweet vanilla smell when you do open it. It spreads a dark, vanilla swirl through the cake mix as you stir it in. Most importantly, it gives a very natural vanilla flavour, noticeably superior to the clear vanilla extract you get in liquid form in bottles.

This product would be absolutely perfect for using in vanilla custards and ice creams. It’s always reassuring to be able to see the vanilla in vanilla-flavoured foods, and the seeds in this vanilla will certainly stay visible.

Reviewed by: Emily Boyd