Exploring Vanilla: From Madagascar to Everleaf

We’re all familiar with the taste of vanilla. Ice cream, sponge cake, perhaps crème brûlée. For me, it’s probably vanilla fudge from the summer fair. It’s one of those flavours of our youth that sticks with us. Sweet, but also elegant, complex, and satisfying.

It’s also one of the flavours I first thought of when opening The Hide, 18 years ago. One of the most popular drinks on our menu for a long time called for vanilla rum, which we made by infusing a vanilla pod in a bottle of aged rum for a couple of weeks before straining and shaking with raspberries and Chambord liqueur, then topping with prosecco - the “Ruby Shoes”.

That’s all a very long way from exotic orchids growing in tropical forests, isn’t it?

I first saw Vanilla planifolia growing in the glasshouses at Kew Gardens. I’d look out their climbing stems and broad green leaves, flush to the trunk of a tree. Not bright and showy like some of the orchids, but with that flavourful secret in their seed pods. I loved the fact that something so unassuming could create such a flavour.

Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to see them in far more remote places, including most recently in Madagascar last year, visiting our supplier to see how their sustainable vanilla programme works on the ground.

This wasn’t just a privileged chance to see them growing (although it was that too). It was an opportunity to learn about vanilla production, and what our supplier is doing to make their production more sustainable.

Vanilla is the world’s second most expensive spice (after another of our ingredients, saffron), which means its production faces lots of challenges, from deforestation to adulteration. One close to my heart as a conservation biologist is the potential loss of natural forest as farms grow to capitalise on vanilla prices, so this was one area I was keen to explore on my visit. In the case of our beans, they’re grown next to one of the oldest protected areas in Madagascar. This means the beans can be grown organically, with no chemicals being washed down from other farms around. In turn, the beans sell for more, giving the forest a value to the community – together with its value as a tourist draw and an educational resource for local schools, this has helped ensure its protection for the last 70 years.

As well as paying a premium for organic, our supplier buys direct, shortening the supply chain, with more money going to the growers. They also fund school teachers, keeping children in education and out of the supply chain, as well as running adult education programmes that help their parents learn how to budget from season to season, as well as teaching them new farming techniques.

Many of those techniques haven’t changed much since vanilla was brought to Madagascar in the 1880s though, with pollination done by hand with a citrus tree spine just as Edmond Albius (a 12-year-old enslaved boy on the island of Reunion) had discovered 40 years earlier (the bee that pollinates vanilla in its native Central America isn’t present in Madagascar). Those same spines are also used to stencil the farmer’s unique code on to the beans as they grow, ensuring they’re traceable in the event of theft. It was amazing to be able to pick up beans in a warehouse and think you could identify who grew each one!

So much care is taken over the vanilla beans and the environment in which they grow. This is what led me to our supplier in the first place – look after the plants and they look after us. The best tasting ingredients make the best drinks.

Our beans are left on the orchids longer than others. They’re riper when picked, with a higher vanillin content. This is risky as they might become overripe, get damaged, or even stolen, but the product is worth it (and worth more).

After harvesting, they begin the process that takes them from farm to your table, developing those flavours on the way. I had hugely underappreciated this stage of the process, and watched a sequence not unlike a grain-to-glass Scottish whisky distillery, with the green beans being quickly immersed in hot water to stop their growing, before being “sweated” for 48 hours in an incubator to develop their flavour. They’re then dried slowly, a process that can take up to a month for bigger beans. Malting and drying if you like the analogy.

Each step changes the character of the beans. Nature in perfect imperfection.

Next, they’re sorted and graded, red/black, split/unsplit, how much moisture remains, what the vanillin content is. Some are further aged in wooden boxes (that whisky comparison again) and graded again into many different levels for different uses and markets. One of the gourmet graders, Aldo, explained how it had taken him 15 years to become a master at sorting the beans. Good vanilla is taken very seriously indeed.

That said, most of the world’s “vanilla flavour” bears little resemblance to these beans. Estimates range from 95-99% of all vanilla flavourings and aromas are artificially manufactured from petrochemicals and wood pulp. It might be called “nature identical” vanillin, but it’s very far from that. Of the remaining percent of natural vanilla, only a tiny fraction is grown and processed with as much care and attention as ours.

This is why we take our ingredient sourcing seriously. 

I now appreciate it more than ever. I love the richness that it brings to Everleaf Forest. And I still love fudge. In fact, I think I’m going to make a batch with some Everleaf Forest in it as an experiment. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Paul