Taylor & Colledge Vanilla Bean Paste with Seeds, 4.9oz Tube

This is a great vanilla bean paste. It's like a gel and it is full of vanilla seeds and flavor. Use equivalent teaspoon to teaspoon for extract.

I am planning a two part teaching kids to cook mini-series: "How to make naturally flavored, butter cream icings" and "how to make mini-cupcakes". The target audience is an pair of 11 year olds. On the first day, we will make a recipe of Butter Cream icing and flavor different cups of it with vanilla, strawberry, cherry, and peach. The second say is putting dollops of it on (and in) mini-cupcakes. When I was coming up with the event, Taylor and Colledge vanilla came immediately to mind. This is simply the best vanilla flavor short of slicing a bean and scraping out the goodness. The tube is small but that is a reasonable size to keep the smell and taste on point. It is a bit more expensive that the chemicals sold as imitation flavor but is less expensive than buying beans. The texture is more concentrated vanilla than a paste and the tube stands on end and doesn't leak.

Oh my gosh! Just amazing! The taste is clean and pure...as good as a home prepared paste using vanilla beans, or better! I've actually bought several for my baking friends. It's that good.

Strong flavor.Tube makes it convenient

A year or two ago, I purchased a box of 12 tubes of Taylor & Colledge Organic Vanilla Bean Paste with Seeds on Amazon. It was quite expensive, and the tubes were small, but the convenience of the squeeze-tubes outweight the cost. I could not resist buying the lot, as I use vanilla bean paste in many or most recipes, even when they do not call for it (I wear my "mad scientist hat all too often). What I loved most about this product was that, (a) the paste is organic, (b) the tubes are much more convenient than dipping a measuring spoon into a jar, which sometimes can be messy, and (c) the taste is excellent. Sometimes (or most times), I squeeze the tube in with my ingredients and guesstimate if it equals a teaspoon or two. I frequently make homemade vanilla bean paste whipped cream, and also a variation by adding 1/4 cup of Ghirardelli's Sweet Ground Chocolate to the whipping cream mixture, both of which get rave reviews from friends and family (when I have time, I will update this review with both recipes). Anyway, since I gave away too many of the original 12 tubes to friends and didn't leave enough for myself, I was happy to find this larger tube of 4.9 ounces. It is a significant size that will last much longer, and I will enjoy using it. I highly recommend this product and will buy it again.

This is the first time I've used a vanilla paste and it did not disappoint! It is full of vanilla flavor in a much better way than liquid vanilla extract. I use this to make homemade vanilla ice cream and it turns out soo nice. Will continue to use this instead of the liquid extract. For some reason I cannot leave a separate review for the lavender paste I also purchased so I'll just say that I wasn't sure what it would taste like, it wasn't bad but I feel like I got more of a smell than a taste of lavender. I also used this in a batch of ice cream and it turned out pretty good.

Vanilla bean paste is amazing for baking

A recipe I was making called for vanilla paste, so I ordered a tube of this. I was very disappointed. The formula is more of a slimy gel, and is slightly viscous and runny. The texture was pretty off-putting and reminded me of the slimy trail a slug leaves behind, which is likely due to the Gum Tragacanth used in the ingredients. There are visible vanilla bean seeds contained in the slime, but I thought the taste was artificial and cloying. I didn't get anything extra taste-wise by adding this to the recipe than I would have with straight vanilla extract. Next time, I am simply going to scrape some vanilla bean pods, use some extract and call it good.