Vanilla bean paste might just be the best invention ever to be had.

I don’t know about you, but it’s awfully tiring to slice and scrape out enough vanilla beans from a pod to make something actually taste like vanilla. Not to mention how much each individual pod costs.

I’m willing to make that sacrifice, however, because vanilla beans (when you have enough of them) just taste so much more vanillaey. And that’s what you are going for if you are using vanilla.

Enter vanilla bean paste. Where someone has go to the trouble to remove all the actual vanilla beans from a pod for you, and instead of pressing them into a liquid, the formulate them inside the liquid, so you see, taste, and get the real bean with every bite.

Even better than that? Vanilla bean paste is a 1 to 1 substitution for vanilla extract. No fancy math calculations necessary.

Enough said.