Mad about Science: Vanilla

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

It has always interested me that the term “vanilla” refers to something as being plain, common or boring. Indeed, vanilla-flavored food is often considered a baseline, such as vanilla and plain yogurt being virtually indistinguishable when purchasing discount brands, but did you know that vanilla is extremely rare, incredibly labor intensive to produce and also the cornerstone of most cuisine?

Vanilla flavoring comes from the vanilla bean, which is a seed pod produced by the vanilla orchid, which only exists in hot, humid climates within 10-20 degrees of the Earth’s equator. It is an extremely delicate vining plant with extremely low tolerances for water and heat outside of its preferred climate. Not only will too much — or not enough — water or sunlight damage the plant, but it will also dramatically alter the taste of the finished bean. Clones of the vanilla orchid grown in different climates around the world will actually produce vastly different flavors.

The flower must be hand pollinated, as many of the regions where the plant has been introduced completely lack a natural pollinator that favors its pollen. The ability to hand-pollinate vanilla orchids for mass production was discovered by Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old slave from Réunion, an island east of Madagascar. Albius would eventually go on to become a horticulturist, but he unfortunately received virtually no financial reward from his discovery, and only gained recognition well after his death in 1880.

Courtesy photo.

The hand pollination of vanilla orchids is a calculated task. The orchid is hermaphroditic, which allows for self-pollination when using a small wooden skewer to press the pollen-producing anther against the stigma. This must be completed within 12 hours of the flower blooming, or the flower will wilt and die without bearing fruit. You would think that due to the scarcity and fragility of the flowers that caretakers would want to pollinate as many as possible, but they will often only pollinate as many as six flowers per vine to avoid stressing the plant while also maximizing the size and flavor in the finished beans.

Vanilla orchid vines can grow to be more than 30 feet long. These vines are dependent on their environment to maintain a structure, such as other trees or trellises built on plantations. It’s not uncommon for plantations to utilize standing trees rather than building new structures. In some cases, this can create a symbiotic relationship between the tree and vine, while also helping the local environment by maintaining flora rather than clearing it for development.

You’ve probably heard of artificial vanilla extract. This synthetic flavoring is created during the paper pulping process to produce a compound called vanillin, which results when the lignin of the pulped wood is broken down using sulfates. This compound is also found in vanilla beans, though the flavor produced by the synthetic vanillin is largely a chemical trick on our brains. 

Another alternative exists and is often touted as being a natural source of vanilla flavoring. It’s an exudate — a mass of cells and fluid that have been excreted from the castor sac of beavers, which is called castoreum. Often, it will have notes of vanilla and raspberry, and is commonly used when flavoring food. It’s been approved as a food additive by the FDA, so don’t worry about that 32-ounce raspberry vanilla slushie you pounded at lunch. It’s just beaver excretion!

Vanilla is indigenous to Mexico, and it was one of the most lauded treasures looted by Hernán Cortés. Cortés brought beans back to Europe, though due to long travel times and a vastly different climate, growing the plants themselves in Europe was impossible. 

Throughout the 1600s and 1700s, with European colonization of Africa and the Indo-Pacific islands, the vanilla orchid set down roots in numerous places where it is still commercially farmed, including Madagascar and Indonesia. 

France was one of the biggest importers of vanilla in the world, eclipsed only by the United States in the 20th century; however, Thomas Jefferson is known to have indulged in spicing his food with vanilla beans in the 1700s. Vanilla beans are as American as apple pie, which has actually been traced back to England during the late 1300s and was based on recipes from France, the Netherlands and the Ottoman Empire.

America’s penchant for taking things and making them popular has applied to vanilla. We are the largest consumer of vanilla in the world by a wide margin, having imported 34.7% of all vanilla produced in 2021, coming to a value of around $338 million. This might seem small compared to some of the multi-billion dollar deals that have been flying around the headlines lately, but that’s a staggeringly huge amount of vanilla beans. 

A quick trip around the internet informed me that the average cost per pound of organic Grade A gourmet vanilla beans was about $180 USD. Grade B Extract beans, which likely represent a much larger share of that $338 million, are considerably cheaper, at around a quarter of the cost of the higher quality beans.

When you think of vanilla, you probably think of sweet things like yogurt and ice cream, but vanilla can be effectively applied to virtually any food group to enhance the depth of flavor. Many dishes will actually call for adding vanilla to fish or steak, and vanilla is a mainstay in many dark alcohols like bourbon and whiskey.

The next time you see something mundane and feel the urge to call it “vanilla,” maybe rethink your insult — you could be unintentionally complimenting it on how complex it actually is.

Stay curious, 7B.