Interesting Vanilla Info

So I received this Cooks Illustrated newsletter in my inbox and it had an article about vanilla taste testing. It said that overall real vanilla was preferred for cakes, icecreams, sauces etc., but for cookies artificial vanilla was preferred to the taste testers. The article went on to say that because cookies get hotter during the baking stage than cakes do internally, a lot of the components of real vanilla burn off or cook off because of the high temperatures. Artificial vanilla maintains its qualities at higher temps than real vanilla.

I usually use only Penzeys vanilla in everything, and I read up more on artificial vanilla (I was for a moment thinking I need to pick up some artificial stuff for cookies) and artificial vanilla, or vanillin, is derived from coal tar or a form of petroleum! Ish, I don't want that in my cookies! However, I feel it's six in one hand and a half dozen in the other. If the cookies taste better, why not use it? But fake stuff scares me, I try my hardest to only use the natural version of things. I don't know, it's a tough quandary right?!

To read the original article from Cooks Illustrated, click here.