ONE evening last September, I sat blindfolded in my kitchen, about to have my taste buds tickled by something I had long taken for granted. I was sniffing and sipping my way through three vanilla extracts, each drawn from a different species of vanilla orchid.
In the tests, I picked out the extract from Vanilla planifolia no problem. As the most common vanilla, I knew it well from every batch of cookie dough I had ever made. The extract from Vanilla pompona, sometimes enjoyed in Central and South America, was subtler. The one from Vanilla tahitensis, popular in French pastries, was sweeter.
The extracts were sent to me by Alan Chambers, a plant breeder with big plans for the spice. Just as he had promised, there was more variety in vanilla than I realised. If his project comes to fruition, there will be far more still to enjoy – and his efforts could help save the crop from crisis.
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Only a fraction of the vanilla we consume is natural; the vast majority is artificial. But this is changing, a shift largely driven by major food manufacturers abandoning the synthetic stuff in their US products in 2015, causing demand to suddenly outstrip supply. What’s more, the crop is highly vulnerable to disease.
“New varieties of vanilla could be more citrusy, smoky, nutty or caramelly”
That is due to a lack of genetic diversity. There are more than 100 species of vanilla orchid, yet we consume only a handful. Chambers plans to make vanilla less, well, vanilla, by tapping into the plant’s gene pool to breed new varieties and introduce wildly different flavours, as well as more resilient plants. But this won’t be straightforward.
Vanilla pods, more commonly known as beans, are the dried fruits of various orchids, which contain the aroma compound vanillin. To bring out this characteristic flavour, the fresh beans are cured with heat, followed by weeks of gradual drying. The whole beans and their seeds can imbue desserts with rich flavours. Those black flecks in créme brûée? Those are orchid seeds. But the beans and seeds can also be used to make vanilla extract by submerging them in alcohol to draw out the flavour.
The plants we consume today originated in Mesoamerica – which encompasses parts of present-day Mexico and Central America – where the alluring qualities of their beans were discovered centuries ago. Like modern-day pastry chefs, the Aztecs and Mayans knew the depth that vanilla adds to chocolate. As the vanilla orchid is a vine, it was easy enough to lop off a piece and plant it someplace new. In the late 1500s, traders began transporting cuttings across the globe. Today, the spice including Mexico, Indonesia, Uganda and Madagascar, which dominates the market.
Like the terroir of wines, shaped by their distinct growing environments, as well as by the genetics of the particular species grown there. New York pastry chef Jessica Craig prizes V. planifolia from Madagascar for its floral notes. Others prefer the anise flavour of V. tahitensis from Tahiti, the origins of which were once a mystery. It has now been shown to be a hybrid of V. planifolia and another species, Vanilla odorata. “The floral notes are very much still there,” says Craig, but Tahitian vanilla also “has a certain sweetness to it”.
These flavour differences owe little to plant breeding. “If you go back and look at the wild ancestors of anything you eat, they’re almost unrecognisable,” says Chambers, who is at the University of Florida. Vanilla is an exception, and closely resembles its wild relatives. Since the early 1900s, breeders have , aiming for stronger flavour or greater disease resistance. But none of these efforts have persisted for long enough to consistently produce improved cultivars.
“What if the Red Delicious was the only apple we had in the grocery store?” says Chambers. “Now we have the better-tasting apples, the Pink Ladies, the Galas and the Fujis. That’s where we’re trying to go with vanilla.” He envisages that new varieties could be bred to taste more citrusy, smoky, caramelly or nutty. But creating new vanillas isn’t something that can be rushed.
The challenge is time, says food scientist Daphna Havkin-Frenkel, CEO of Bakto Flavors, a New Jersey-based producer and distributor of vanilla and other natural flavours. A vanilla plant takes around four years to grow from seed to flower, and then another nine months for its beans to ripen. “It’s a long process and a long commitment,” she says.
“A lack of genetic diversity limits the flavour of one of our most beloved spices”
Rather than waiting five or more years to develop these slowly maturing plants into a new variety, growers cultivate the plants – mostly V. planifolia – using cuttings, essentially clones of those that grew in Mesoamerica centuries ago. This lack of genetic diversity limits the flavours on offer and makes the plants an easy target for a Fusarium fungus, the same genus that .
But most of the vanilla we consume bypasses this growing process completely. It is derived from vanillin that is chemically synthesised from various sources, primarily guaiacol (a petrochemical precursor) and lignin (a by-product from pulp and paper production). Around 18,000 tonnes of vanillin is , but in recent years demand has risen for “all natural” varieties. Eighty to 90 per cent of this natural vanilla comes from V. planifolia, estimates Havkin-Frenkel. “There is a shortage of good-quality, reliable beans,” she says, which drives the price up.
Pastry chef Cedric Barberet, owner of a bistro in Pennsylvania, says he favours vanilla from Madagascar, but these days buys it from Indonesia because it is less expensive. “I use a very common vanilla bean and I already pay $165 for that for 8 ounces.”
To address this issue, growers are establishing plantations in India and Ecuador and in greenhouses in the Netherlands, and these new markets should help stabilise and lower prices, says Havkin-Frenkel. Chambers, too, joined the vanilla cause in 2016 after reading about the vanilla shortage. Then a newly hired professor, he looked at the balmy southern Florida landscape and thought that, with the proper breeding, he could grow some right there. And by focusing on flavour, it might also be possible to expand the culinary potential of one of the world’s most beloved spices.
Its signature flavour comes from vanillin, but there are around 600 other compounds identified in vanilla and 100 or more may contribute directly to flavour, says Havkin-Frenkel. Concentrations of these compounds vary by species. By drawing on more species, as well as broader genetic diversity within currently cultivated species, Chambers hopes to uncover a greater variety of aroma compounds. Through breeding, he expects to create entirely new flavours. “Because we’re combining molecular and biochemical pathways from two different plants, we can get compounds we’ve never seen before,” he says.
Chambers began by collecting more than 100 vanilla plants representing 23 species from around the globe. Some he received from colleagues, botanical gardens, private collectors or online vendors. Others he collected locally. There are four vanilla species native to Florida, as well as imported species, including V. planifolia, that now grow wild. When Chambers collected one cutting, a naturally formed hybrid of V. planifolia and Vanilla phaeantha, he knew he had something special. “The dominant aroma is marshmallow,” he says.
Full flavour
As his collection took shape, Chambers developed genetic tests to determine which plants belong to which species. The , published in 2019, show that some plants had previously been misidentified based on their appearance. Others are actually hybrids of multiple species. Importantly, the analyses show that a great deal of genetic diversity remains to be tapped, even within V. planifolia. Another by Chambers and his colleagues has uncovered genes that may affect vanillin production, disease resistance and yield.
Chambers continues to collect plants, adding to those already growing in his 2800-square-metre nursery at the University of Florida. There, row after row of lime green vines climb as high as 2 metres up bamboo stakes or mesh cylinders under a canopy of gauzy black fabric that offers protection from the intense Florida sun. Most plants haven’t matured yet. But when they do, each vine will don blooms in shades of reds, greens, yellows or creamy whites, depending on the species. The scent of most will be unremarkable, offering no hint of the rich aromas that may come from the cured beans, says Chambers.
As each plant begins producing beans, he will look for standouts to use as parents for the next generation based on qualities such as disease resistance, bean production and, of course, flavour. To explore flavour, extracts will be sent to plant physiologist Anne Plotto and chemist Jinhe Bai at the US Department of Agriculture’s US Horticultural Research Laboratory in Florida. The researchers will measure the concentrations of aroma compounds in each sample. They will also present samples to a sensory panel of 10 to 15 people trained to describe flavours using terms like floral, buttery, sulphury and medicinal. At the University of Florida, a separate sensory panel of about 150 students will answer an equally important question: do the extracts taste good?
Pinning down the precise chemistry of these flavours and aromas is maddeningly complex. That is because compound mixtures “can have a synergistic effect” that leads to unexpected outcomes, says Plotto.
“We still don’t really know what makes a pepper smell like a habanero,” says vegetable breeder Michael Mazourek at Cornell University in New York, whose own breeding programme brings out new flavours in crops like squash and chilli peppers. But that didn’t stop him from breeding a new habanero with the usual flavour but none of its astonishing heat. He is hopeful that Chambers, too, will bring out flavour variations in vanilla that we are accustomed to finding in other crops. “It is probably just waiting there in vanilla,” he says.
Chambers is beginning to cross the earliest maturing plants in his collection. He won’t know the flavour potential of the offspring until they develop beans – a good three years from now. If these first crosses produce promising plants, Chambers could release a new vanilla in five to 10 years.
“Everyone will be happy to have beans that have more flavours,” says Havkin-Frenkel. But the trick to pleasing food producers will be breeding vanilla that is different, yet still very much vanilla, she says.
There are also regulatory reasons not to stray too far. Only V. planifolia and V. tahitensis “vanilla” in the US. Still, if the right vanilla came along, Havkin-Frenkel thinks that could change. “If a new variety is resistant to Fusarium, grows fast, has much more flavour and maybe different flavours, companies that extract vanilla can go to the Food and Drug Administration and the only thing they would have to prove is that it isn’t toxic.”
Pastry chefs Craig and Barberet are eager to try the new flavours. “I’m very interested to see how these plants will come out,” says Barberet. “Marshmallowy, fruity, little spice notes – all of those flavour profiles are very good to go with pastry.” Meanwhile, Craig is hoping for something with a roasted nutty profile, or a flavour that complements lavender or rose. Whatever the outcome, she is excited to try a new vanilla. “Hands down,” she says, “pastry chefs everywhere would have a really good time with that.”
