Boozy Bourbon Vanilla?

When I  returned full-time to the culinary world, the thing I love most is learning about food’s history, culture, and geography. I love seeing what trends repeat, and what trends are new and exciting.

One of the ingredients that is a staple in cookie making is vanilla.

Vanilla is one of the world’s most labor-intensive flavors, demanding a human touch at each step during the 18-month growing process. Vanilla planifolia is the species that is most commonly used in vanilla, and its birthplace is in Mexico. When it was brought to Europe, horticulturalists in France and England struggled to cultivate vanilla orchids in the botanical gardens; the flowers never developed fruit because the orchid’s natural pollinator, the Melipona bee, was back in south-eastern Mexico. However, in 1841 a 12-year-old enslaved worker named Edmond Albius discovered a painstaking method for hand-pollinating each flower by pressing together its pollen-coated male part against its female part. (And this is just step one!!)

So why Bourbon? In the 1700s, cuttings of vanilla planifolia were taken to other tropical countries. About 100 years later, the French developed large plantations on Reunion (located about 950 km east of Madagascar.) Back then Reunion was known as the Isle de Bourbon. So Bourbon vanilla does not come from the Bourbon whiskeys which I love, but rather from its growing place in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Vanilla delivers sweet, warm, and creamy flavors to everything it is added to. What gives it its variation is the presence of vanillin, of which Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla has the highest concentration. In the stores you will see Mexican Vanilla, Tahitian Vanilla, Vanilla from Kenya, India, and other countries - It’s fun to discover the differences in flavor, but if you see imitation vanilla, just run the other way, life is too short for that kind of negativity.