Vanilla ice cream is a popular flavor made from vanilla seeds, which are expensive due to the labor-intensive process of growing vanilla orchids. The US is the top consumer of ice cream, with New Zealand in second place. Homemade vanilla ice cream is easy to make with a mixture of milk, sugar, salt, and flavored cream.
Vanilla ice cream is a form of cold or partially frozen desert that is flavored with vanilla seeds, which aren’t actually beans at all but fruit seed pods from plants in the Vanilla Orchid genus. Although vanilla ice cream is often considered the simplest and most common of ice cream flavors, vanilla spice is the second most expensive spice available after saffron due to the labor demands of growing vanilla orchids. As of 2011, popularity charts for various ice cream flavors consistently put vanilla ice cream at the top of the list, with about 29% of people preferring it overall. The second most popular flavor, chocolate, only ranks as the top favorite with 8.9 percent of ice cream fans.
Since orchids are tropical plants, the Vanilla Orchid is grown only in select regions of the globe. The main exporters of vanilla are Madagascar, Mexico and Tahiti. Due to the expense of the vanilla beans, much of the modern vanilla ice cream is made with a 35% ABV vanilla extract. Imitation vanilla flavoring is also used in many vanilla ice cream desserts, with the flavor coming largely from lignin, a by-product of wood processing in the pulp and paper industries.
There are also many homemade ice cream recipes for vanilla, as it is a relatively simple flavor to make. Ice cream itself is a dessert that has been around since at least 1700 AD, when Governor Bladen of the state of Maryland in the United States is known to have first served it to his guests. The first recipes for the dessert first appeared in the same year, with the press of the French cookbook L’Art de Faire des Glaces.
Commercial ice cream machines or home ice cream makers are commonplace and come with instructions on how to make many unique flavors of ice cream. The process is quite simple and involves chilling a mixture of cow’s milk, sugar, salt and flavored cream in a central tub surrounded by ice. The motorized blades transform the ingredients into a thick paste-like mixture that is frozen afterwards for greater texture and thickness.
As of 2011, the United States ranks as the first nation in the world in terms of ice cream consumption, with US citizens consuming an average of 5.5 gallons (21 liters) per person annually. New Zealand is in second place and sometimes takes the lead from the United States, followed by Denmark, Australia and Belgium/Luxembourg to round out the top five. In the UK alone, 2.1 gallons (8 litres) of ice cream are consumed per person per year. An estimated 1.52 billion gallons (575 billion liters) of ice cream was produced and consumed in 2009, or about 26 percent of the entire frozen dairy market.
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