Vanilla beans

Boy, that sure was fast. Bought these via "buy now" two days ago, and here they are. I opened the package and

}}} POW! {{{

The intoxicating scent of vanilla filled the entire room.

Mexican vanilla beans acquired through eBay. A bargain at twice the price. The real deal. The original vanilla planiflora V. fragrans, the type taken to Madagascar by the Bourbons and the type from which the Tahitian varietal is derived. The conditions on Tahiti are so exotic that the cultivated plants there evolved into a whole new floral type. Vanilla is a tremendous up-and-coming export crop for third-world African nations, and those beans are available too in great quantity on eBay at stupendously low prices. I urge you to try them. They're smaller by half, the newer African beans, and it's not at all that I don't trust them, it's that I've always wanted to try the Mexican beans, the import of which has been discouraged for years due to an itsy-bitsy teensy-weensy tiny little problem with the use of paraquat. But now that's gone and we can all sigh with relief. The Mexican beans are more expensive X2 or X3, in some cases X4 or more depending on type and size and grade and quantity. This is about the smallest reasonable quantity offered. Some beans are for the expressed purpose of extract, but at least this should get the curiosity out of my system.

Frankly, I expected these beans to be a lot fatter and more covered with sparkly residue. I'm recalling Tyler Florence's reaction to Mexican vanilla beans when he first encountered them on one of his earlier traveling shows on Food Network (before he transformed himself into a FN chatterbox interjecting the filler words "alright" and "right" and "okay" into every single sentence with few exceptions in order to keep rattling and avoid the dread of silence for two or more miliseconds. If you were to play a drinking game and take a shot at each instance, you'd be falling-down drunk within minutes. I can't take it. My parrot is more interesting to listen to. Okay, that's a lie. Never had a parrot.) They resemble too closely the Madagascar-Bourbons I got before, and the Tahitian I got before were chubby little guys. I bought so much they dried out before I got around to them all, they all went brittle, and that's a shame. Well, I won't be making that mistake again.

I read in Smithsonian that the problem of Mexican vanilla bean rustling is so great that growers have taken to branding each individual bean. Double checking that, I see the Madagascar beans are branded too. They're branded electronically with numbers burned in tiny dots. Of course, the beans are branded when they're green and still growing, so maybe the numbers disappear as the beans shrivel and darken. I do not know. What do I look like, a vanilla bean expert over here?

I feel a Jones coming on for ice cream or frozen custard.