Vanilla

Pure vanilla, with its wonderful aromatic flavor, is the most widely used flavoring in pastries, confections, and other desserts.  It is the second most expensive spice in the world, next to saffron, and as much as flavor chemists try with the glycoside found in the sapwood of certain conifers or from coal extracts, the cheaper synthetic vanillas on the market today do not come close to competing with pure vanilla.  As Rosengarten in 1969 stated, imitation vanilla lacks pure vanilla's "pure, spicy, delicate flavor and peculiar bouquet".

As you learn about vanilla you start to appreciate why it is so expensive.  It begins with a celadon colored orchid, the only orchid of about 20,000 varieties that bears anything edible.  Native only to Central America it took until the 19th century for botanists to figure out how it could be grown commercially in other tropical climates.  The problem was that this orchid, in order to produce the vanilla pod (beans), needs to be pollinated by bees, Melipona bees to be precise, or a species of hummingbird.  And these species were only in Central America.  The second problem to commercial growers was that when the orchid flower opens it does so for a very short time, less than a day.  If the flower is not pollinated by the bees in that short time, it will fall off.  So even though the bees were introduced to other tropical areas of the world, commercial growers could not depend on the bees pollinating all the open orchid flowers.  It wasn't until "hand pollination" of the flowers was developed that vanilla could be successfully grown commercially.

Vanilla, is the fruit of a thick green orchid vine (v. planifolia) that grows wild on the edge of the Mexican tropical forests.  The vines, when grown wild, will grow up to the top of tall trees in the jungle.  Commercially, the vines are pruned for a few reasons.  One, is that the vines will not flower until they stop growing.  And two, the vines need to be at a height where workers can reach them.  Once the vines stop growing they produce clusters of buds that eventually develop into orchids, up to 1000 flowers for one vine.  Not all the flowers are hand pollinated though.  They are thinned out so as to guarantee good quality beans, albeit fewer in quantity.  After hand pollination, the flowers develop into long thin green pods or beans that can grow up to 12 inches (30 cm) long.  Average length is about 8 inches long.  These tasteless and odorless green pods are hand picked when they are still not ripe and then the fermentation process begins.  The beans are first plunged into hot water and then the 'drying' and 'sweating' process starts.  The beans are dried in the sun during the day and then wrapped in the blankets at night so they can sweat.  This process can last anywhere from 2 to 6 months until the beans become a very dark brown color and develop a white crystalline substance (or frost) on the outside of the bean, called vanillin.  The vanillin is what gives the beans their wonderful flavor and aroma and these beans are prized.  At this point the beans are aged to bring out their full flavor, and this can take up to two years.  Once dried and cured the vanilla pods need to be kept airtight to retain their wonderful flavor.

Today about 70 - 80% of the world's vanilla comes from the islands of Madagascar and R?/font>union in the Indian Ocean where the plants were first introduced around 1840.    The  Madagascar or Madagascar-Bourbon vanilla beans are often referred to as "bourbon beans" because the French first planted the vine on the Isle de Bourbon (renamed R?/font>union).  These beans have a smooth, rich, sweet flavor and are the thinnest of the vanilla beans grown.