Claire Saffitz

So for a chocolate chip cookie or a blondie, any kind of

baked good, where you want a butterscotchiness, whether that's from caramel or toffee or, you know, any combination of these flavors, like you have to have a lot of vanilla is so essential.

So, and brown butter, brown butter and vanilla together are just the most magical combination.

Vanilla and citrus zest also is such...

creates this kind of hybrid, like floral flavor enhancer that is so magical, like orange zest and vanilla together in like a sweet bun or in a cake is, it is in some ways like greater than the sum of its parts.

You could do orange zest, lemon zest and vanilla together.

And if you have vanillas, you know, if you have seeds from a bean and you have zest and you massage it into sugar, the perfume that it creates is so, so amazing and powerful.

So-

Those are the times where I think vanilla is so enhancing and it does not get lost.

Like all of those things together kind of create a new, even more amazing flavor.

And then there's other combinations where I think it can be overpowered or it just gets lost and kind of obscured.

And so then I'm going to maybe throw in like a little bit of maybe extract just there in the background.

I think sometimes chocolate and vanilla, like chocolate is a really strong flavor.

So I think it's not, of course it's delicious, but it's just doesn't work with chocolate in the same way that it works with these other kinds of ingredients.

So yeah, citrus and anything like butterscotchy, caramelly, definitely.

I generally, even though I am someone who is adding vanilla to like a lot of my baked goods, I don't add it to every single one.

I don't think it's,

an afterthought in that way that looks like, oh, just the thing you add a couple of splashes of.

I think vanilla is best when actually it is its own flavor and that it's not just their flavor.

for the sake of being there because we think that we have to add it to baked goods.