Forget about sticker shock at the gas pump. Have you bought any vanilla lately?

At Whole Foods Market in Edgewater, a jar with two beans about five inches long retails for $8.99. That's a unit price of $449.50 for 100 beans. Extract is pricey too, at $35.98 per pint, and powder costs $70.34 per pound.

No wonder cooks from homes to commercial establishments are tempted to use the cheaper artificial version. That's a way of thinking that registered dietitian and licensed nutritionist Brenda Koth hopes to reverse.

Koth is director of sales training at Watkins Inc., a Winona, Minn.-based company that's been selling pure vanilla extract since 1895 -- more than a century after Thomas Jefferson is said to have imported the first vanilla pods from France to the United States.

Vanilla-bean production, she says, is "the most expensive agricultural process because it's extremely time- and labor-intensive."

Its long journey from blossom to palate is subject to the whims of weather, depends on exquisitely precise growing and curing techniques and starts with a single, exotic flower.

The Vanilla planifolia is the only orchid of the world's 35,000 naturally occurring species that produces edible fruit. The thin beans (or pods) don't grow, however, unless the flower is pollinated. In Mexico, where vanilla beans were first cultivated in the pre-Columbian era, the Melipona bee took care of that.

But Melipona couldn't live outside Mexico. So the orchids that colonists and explorers brought to regions straddling the equator flowered but bore no fruit.

Only hours to pollinate

That changed in the mid-19th century, when a former slave on Madagascar discovered that self-pollination would jump-start the flower into making beans.

To this day, Madagascar and the nearby islands of Comoros, Reunion and Mauritius -- as well as Indonesia, Tahiti and Mexico -- are the only places where planifolia flourishes.

But pollination is still up to humans, who must seize a very small window of opportunity. Each orchid opens for only a few hours one morning a year. Agricultural workers inspect the vines of their thousands of flowers every day. They fold back an open flower's membrane separating the sex organs, then press male anther to female stigma with a needle.

Once grown after about nine months and harvested by hand, the beans undergo a six-month curing process. They're spread on mats to absorb the sun's heat, wrapped in blankets and straw mats at night to "sweat," and finally stored in holding rooms to cure. "The beans are handled hundreds of times by workers," notes Koth.

Low supply recovers

Weather can be a villain. Cyclone Hudah hit Madagascar in April 2000 and wiped out a third of the crop. That loss, having to replant the orchids (which take two to three years to first blossom) and bad weather in 2003, which caused only one-fifth of the new orchids to blossom, all made wholesale prices spike in 2004 to $275 per pound.

Supply has recovered and the price has plummeted to $35 per pound. That's welcome news to food scientist Frank Tangel Jr., director of technical application at Flavor & Fragrance Specialties' research lab in Mahwah, where he directs the development of new proprietary flavors.

"There's nothing like the rich, creamy profile of vanilla," Tangel says. "It tastes good in itself, and as a base enhances just about every flavor, like fruit, cinnamon and other spices."

It even, he adds, enhances the flavor of salt in products like soups and sauces without increasing sodium content.

FFS buys vanilla products from International Flavors & Fragrances in Dayton. They use mostly extract, which manufacturers like IFF and Watkins produce by continuously recirculating alcohol and water through the beans. (The FDA requires extract to have a minimum of 13.35 ounces of beans to a gallon of minimum 35 percent alcohol to 65 percent water mixture.)

Flavors from Mahwah

FFS develops new flavors for national clients. When Dunkin' Donuts, for example, wanted a vanilla-flavored coffee, it sent coffee beans to FFS. Tangel and his staff of food technologists, flavor chemists and compounders followed the typical two-month, 15-step process -- including analysis, quality control and taste-testing -- to develop the flavor.

After approval by Dunkin' Donuts, FFS sent the formula -- one of 100 vanilla flavor applications in its 65,000-application database -- for production in its Baltimore plant. So that vanilla shot you get at your local Dunkin' Donuts was concocted in Mahwah.

If you're looking for another kind of kick, FFS also provided the vanilla flavoring for Captain Morgan Spiced Rum and Stolichnaya Stoli Vanil vodka.

It's like wine

Despite the expense, vanilla extract can be considered a bargain. Its intense flavor means that you need to use only a little to perform culinary magic. No refrigeration is necessary, only storage -- preferably in a glass container, away from heat and light.

And like wine, vanilla extract ages well. Its taste only gets tastier.