Over 20 years ago, we saw vanilla vines clinging to trees in the forest. Now, with more controlled cultivation, many vanilla plants are grown and trellised in shadehouses to achieve the optimum growing conditions. Once the pods fully form, they are harvested and sweated in wooden boxes.
This process activates naturally-produced enzymes which ultimately turn the pods black and create the flavour of vanilla. After sweating in the wood boxes, the vanilla pods are placed out in the sunshine on mats, where they absorb the heat of the sun, and the enzyme action continues to produce vanillin.
At night, the vanilla beans are stacked on racks where they will continue to sweat during the tropical evening. The next day, they are put out in the sun again, and put to bed that night. This process goes on for between 12 to 28 days depending on the size, thickness and moisture content of the pods.
We currently source these from Mexico. Add a whole vanilla bean to fruit during stewing, or slit the bean open and scrape out the millions of sticky seeds within to blend through ice-cream, unflavoured yoghurt or rich, thick cream.
Vanilla extract is made by steeping chopped, cured vanilla beans in alcohol and then distilling off much of the spirit. Published by Robert Rose Inc. Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Having seen huge drifts of plastic in the pristine seas off the Indonesian islands, we know just how important it is to get rid of those shopping bags, plastic wraps and sandwich bags. While the major species of vanilla orchids are now grown around the world, they originally came from Mesoamerica, including parts of modern day Mexico and Guatemala.
The vanilla orchid is a vine-like plant that grows up trees. The vine can grow up to 30 feet long. The most widely used orchid to produce vanilla is the Vanilla planifolia. The Vanilla planifolia, or Flat-Leaved Vanilla , is the only orchid used for industrial food production. The plant part that is used is the pod. The vanilla pod is frequently referred to as the bean.
The pods are picked when they are still not ripe , and then plunged into hot water and laid out to dry for anywhere from two to six months.
The vanilla pod contains thousands of tiny black seeds. While these pods can be very expensive, scraping them yields a potent vanilla flavor and the black specs that will color whatever you're baking. They're definitely worth the splurge. Vanilla extract comes from macerating vanilla beans and mixing them with water and alcohol. From there, the beans undergo alternating periods of sun drying during the day and sweating at night, a journey that lasts between five and 15 days and ends with a period of slow drying.
About pounds of green vanilla beans are needed to produce one pound of processed vanilla—yet another reason why vanilla is one of the most expensive spices in the world, second only to saffron. But the reality is that very little of the vanilla we consume comes from those precious pods.
Today, most of what we eat is actually artificial vanilla flavoring. As Iain Fraser , a professor of agri-environmental economics at the University of Kent, recently wrote in The Conversation , less than 1 percent of the total global market in vanilla flavor is actually sourced from vanilla beans.
In the late 19th century, scientists figured out how to derive vanillin—the dominant compound that gives vanilla its signature aroma—from less expensive sources. These included eugenol a chemical compound found in clove oil and lignin, which is found in plants, wood pulp and even cow feces. In short, vanilla is the plant. Vanillin is one of up to chemical compounds that make up the flavor we know as vanilla. Vanillin produced naturally in the bean varies from place to place which results in different flavor profiles.
Imitation vanillin extracted from lignin or guaiacol is very standard, rather than distinct. She adds that, when used in cookies and cakes, professional taste panelists have not been able to determine a difference in flavor between real and artificial vanilla because many ancillary flavor compounds diminish when heated.
Right now, this demand for inexpensive vanilla flavoring comes with an environmental cost. This catalyst could theoretically be re-used and, they hope, lead to more environmentally-friendly ways of manufacturing the alluring compound. That synthetic vanillin will be badly needed, because prices for real vanilla are subject to more than just consumer whims. The devastating storm was the third-biggest cyclone on record, and hit a country already grappling with years of drought.
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