“There is a greeness to it, what I imagine it smells like when you snap a piece of citrus off a branch,” says Bon Appetit contributor Heather Eddy. She admits that she wore vanilla extract as a perfume as a young girl and is tempted to do the same with Fiori di Sicilia.
The essential oil can replace vanilla extract in recipes and it is used throughout the canon of Italian baking – like in panettone and colomba. Eddy, who was raised in a Polish family, reveals the scent reminds her of her grandmother’s babka and suggests using it in enriched doughs. With exact ingredients remaining mysterious, the recipe is a bit of a guarded secret.