Photo credit. Deposit Photos. Even though we call them vanilla beans, they are actually not a bean at all. In place of ...

Vanilla beans — the most expensive spice in the ... Not to mention the fact that the vanilla flower only stays in bloom for a single day, making pollination by hand extremely difficult and ...

Vanilla vines take two to four years to fully mature, and their flowers only bloom for one day of the year. In order for the plants to produce beans, they have to be pollinated that day.

Vanilla beans begin as the seedpods of a tropical ... which can take up to five years to mature. Each flower must be pollinated the one day that it blooms or else the stem bears no fruit.

I bake a lot, which means I go through a lot of vanilla beans. For some preparations, I use only the seeds – I split the vanilla bean in half lengthwise and scrape out the tiny seeds with the ...