"Let's have a vanilla cone!" On hot summer days, as you eat delicious ice cream, drink chilled sodas, and enjoy the freshness of vanilla, scientists are busy making this natural spice of nature's gift more colorful, promising to take on different flavors such as citrus, smoky, nuts or caramel.
Nowadays, more and more food manufacturers are abandoning the use of synthetic additives, but people can not be less delicious on the tip of the tongue, and the potential to develop different flavors of vanilla is huge. Plant breeders want vanilla to be less "vanilla", they will have a different taste, and they will be more adaptable to the environment, but this is not easy to achieve.
Vanilla extract is a well-known food additive. It is a regular customer on many recipe lists of ice cream, soft drinks, pastries, milk teas, snacks and so on.
If you taste it carefully, you will find that there are subtle differences in the taste of vanilla extracts extracted from different kinds of vanilla orchids. For example, the most common vanilla extract is extracted from vanilla orchid, and people want to make vanilla-flavored pastries, they will add a few drops to the powder paste dough; the vanilla extracted from West Indian vanilla is more popular in central and southern America, and its taste is more subtle; the vanilla extracted from Tahiti vanilla orchid has a sweet taste and is often used in French desserts.
Extracting food flavors from natural plants is gradually becoming a trend. As people become more willing to abandon the use of synthetics in food production, the demand for natural flavors will soar, and the market will also put forward higher taste diversity requirements for them.
With limited varieties, low yields, susceptibility to pests and diseases, and high prices, how can vanilla plants meet the new needs of the human food industry? Cultivating new vanilla products has become an important task for plant breeders. Alan Chambers, a plant breeder at the University of Florida in the United States, believes that in fact, there are not many types of vanilla in nature, and he has a grand plan, if it can be successful, not only the variety of vanilla will be more abundant, but also the shortcomings that vanilla is currently facing may also be overcome.
Not simple natural "vanilla flavor"
Only a small fraction of the vanilla we eat is natural and mostly synthetic, but that's changing.
Since 2015, more and more food manufacturers have announced that they are abandoning the use of synthetic compounds in food preparation, which has led to a surge in demand for a variety of natural food ingredients, far exceeding supply. Vanilla is one of them, and because such crops are susceptible to pests and diseases, it is difficult to increase yields in the short term.
Although there are more than 100 varieties of vanilla orchids in nature, humans have only utilized a small fraction of them. Chambers wants vanilla to be less "vanilla" – he uses data from plant gene banks to create more diverse varieties of vanilla that will have a different taste and be more environmentally adaptable. But this is not simple to implement.
People often say that vanilla is actually a kind of orchid plant, the scientific name is "vanilla orchid", the result is actually a pod-like, also known as vanilla pods, vanilla beans. The dried fruit of these orchids contains hundreds of aromatic compounds, including vanillin.
Fresh vanilla beans need to be heated and air-dried for weeks to bring out their unique flavor. The fruit and seeds of vanilla pods can inject a rich taste into desserts, such as the black spots on the caramel pudding are its seeds, and soaking its seeds and beans in wine can also extract the fragrance to make vanilla essence.
The vanilla we eat today originated in Central America. Centuries ago, people discovered the attractive quality of this bean. Like modern pastry chefs, the Aztecs and Maya knew that vanilla could make chocolate more unique.
Vanilla orchids belong to the large climbing orchid family and can be grown in different places by cuttings. In the second half of the 16th century, European merchants transported the herbs cultivated by cuttings to the world. Today, the spice is commercially grown in many tropical countries, including Mexico, Indonesia, Uganda and Madagascar, where vanilla spices dominate the market.
Similar to red wine, vanilla in different regions has different flavors due to different growing environments. The pod orchid in Madagascar, Africa, is praised by pastry chef Jessica Craig in New York, USA, for its unique floral fragrance. Tahitian vanilla orchids from Tahiti in the South Pacific are also loved by many people because of their fennel flavor and certain sweetness. However, it is not clear about its origin, only that it is a variety produced by the hybridization of vanilla and another plant.
New product cultivation "wait once every five years"
Plant breeding has a very obvious effect on the taste change of many crops. Chambers said, "If you can travel back in time, you'll find that everything you eat tastes differently than you know." But vanilla is an exception, it tastes similar to the taste of its ancestors. Since the early 20th century, plant breeders have been working to improve vanilla varieties, and they have not been able to develop improved varieties with more unique flavors or insect pest resistance, but they have not been able to develop improved varieties with stable traits.
Chambers said it's like an apple in a store, which used to have a single variety, but now we have a number of varieties that have a better taste, such as Red Pink Lady, Gala Fruit and Red Fuji. "We want vanilla to have so many varieties to choose from." In his vision, new varieties of vanilla could have more citrus, marshmallow, smoky, caramel or nutty flavors.
However, the cultivation of new varieties is not urgent, and time is a huge challenge. Food scientist Daphna Hafkin-Frenkel said it takes about four years for a vanilla plant to go from seed to flowering, followed by another nine months for the beans to ripen, "a long process."
Few growers are willing to wait about five years to breed a new variety, so they choose to grow vanilla by cuttings. In essence, this is a replica of the Mesoamerican vanilla that was planted centuries ago. This practice led to a lack of genetic diversity in vanilla crops, which in turn limited the development of new flavors of vanilla, and made vanilla vulnerable to Fusarium, which also attacked bananas that also lacked genetic diversity.
In fact, most of the vanilla flavors we consume don't go through this process, because it's a chemical synthesis called vanillin, and the main ingredients are guaiacol (the predecessor of petrochemicals) and lignin (a by-product of papermaking). Each year, the global consumption of vanillin is about 20,000 tons.
However, the demand for all-natural vanilla flavors has been increasing in recent years. Hafkin-Frenkel estimates that about 80 to 90 percent of this vanilla comes from vanilla, and there is still a shortage of good quality, reliable vanilla beans on the market, so the price of vanilla spices is also rising.
Pastry chef Cedric Barbery, who has a small restaurant in Pennsylvania, usa, loves Malagasy vanilla, but recently he has had to source vanilla from Indonesia because it's cheaper. He said, "The vanilla beans I use are very ordinary, but it costs $165 for 8 ounces."
Hafkin-Frenkel said growers have built many plantations in India and Ecuador, as well as greenhouses in the Netherlands to boost vanilla production, which has led to lower vanilla prices.
Collect 100 herbs to discover new flavors
After learning of the vanilla shortage in 2016, Chambers also joined the ranks of the study of vanilla.
At the time, Chambers was a newly hired professor, and looking at the mild environment of Southern Florida, he wondered, with proper breeding techniques, can vanilla be grown here? If you can focus on the flavor study of vanilla, will the world's most popular spice release more culinary charm?
According to Hufkin-Frenkel, this is not a fantasy. The most widely used vanilla extract is now used, and its flavor comes from vanillin. There are more than 600 natural aromatic compounds in vanilla, of which more than 100 can be used for flavoring. Moreover, different varieties of vanilla have different concentrations of natural products synthesized. Therefore, there is great potential to develop different flavors of vanilla spices.
Chambers also plans to discover a wider range of genetic diversity and look for more aromatic compounds through the hybridization of vanilla with other plants. "We're trying to fuse molecules and biochemical channels of two different plants, which could lead to compounds that have never been seen before," he said.
Chambers collected more than 100 herbs from around the world, some from colleagues, botanical gardens, private collectors and online stores, or some himself. "Florida has 4 native species and some imported species, including vanilla." Chambers said he also collected a special variety produced by the natural hybridization of vanilla and multi-leaf vanilla propagated by cuttings, "which has a strong marshmallow aroma."
After completing the collection, Chambers conducted plant taxonomic identification and genetic testing of his vanilla varieties. In 2019, he published the results of his work: some plants had previously been misjudged as vanilla because of their appearance, and some varieties were actually hybrids of multiple species. What's more, the analysis shows that vanilla plants also have a lot of genetic diversity worth mining, even including vanilla. In another study Chambers collaborated with colleagues, they identified genes that may affect vanillin concentrations, vanilla crop yields, and pest resistance.
At the University of Florida, Chambers has a 2,800-square-meter nursery where he grows a constant collection of vanilla varieties. Now, he has crossed the first plants that matured in the nursery, but he is not sure whether the hybrid plants will produce new flavors and flavors, and they will not be able to see until they have beans in three years. If the first hybridization attempts were successful, he might be able to develop a new vanilla variety or more in another five to ten years.
The world is looking forward to "new flavors" of vanilla
According to the growth characteristics of vanilla, Chambers nursery has taken very good sun protection measures: there is a layer of black tulle outside the canopy to block the sun, under the canopy are rows of bamboo stakes and net barrels, vanilla vines grow up along them, and green vines can climb to about 2 meters high. When these herbs are ripe, depending on the variety, red, green, yellow or milky white flowers will bloom on each vine.
When vanilla produces beans, Chambers will choose the more smelly ones as the breeding mother. He also invited physiologist Ann Proto of the Florida Horticultural Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and chemist Jinhe Bai to conduct research and development. Chambers would send vanilla extracts to two scientists who would measure the concentration of aromatic compounds in the samples, and would send the samples to a sensory group of 10 to 15 people to describe the flavors of the different vanilla extracts—describing their feelings in words like floral, buttery, sulfur, medicinal, and so on. At the same time, a sensory group of 150 people has been formed within the University of Florida, and they need to give an equally important feedback: Does the extract taste good or not?
Ploto admits that the chemical composition that forms these flavors and aromas is very complex, because it is an unexpected result of the synergistic effect of mixing different compounds, so it is not easy to determine the composition of their flavor.
Perhaps, even if you don't understand the clear components of plant flavor, it won't have much impact on breeding new varieties. Michael Mazulek, a vegetable breeder at Cornell University in the United States, has successfully developed a new flavor variety of pumpkin and chili peppers, saying: "Although we still don't know why Havana peppers are so spicy, I am cultivating a new type of Havana pepper that is not so spicy." He hopes Chambers will also cultivate new vanilla products with more flavors.
"If the beans come out with a new flavor, we'll all be happy." Hafkin-Frenkel adds that from a food manufacturer's point of view, they do want a different vanilla, but the taste of the new varieties cannot be too far from the traditional flavors.
In addition, some food regulatory regulations also limit the diversification of vanilla flavors. In the United States, only beans and extracts of vanilla and tahitian vanilla orchid can be labeled "vanilla". "If there are really high-quality new products, this should be able to change." Hafkin-Frenkel believes that if the new variety of vanilla can resist Fusarium, the growth cycle is faster, the taste is better, even if it is very different from the previous vanillin flavor, the spice company only needs to take a sample to the Food and Drug Administration to prove that it meets the consumption requirements.
Pastry chefs Craig and Barbery are also particularly keen to try new flavors. "I'd love to know what flavor these plants will end up with, and if there's vanilla with marshmallows, fruit, fennels that can be added to dessert," Barbery said. Craig hopes that the new varieties of vanilla can have a roasted nutty flavor, or can be matched with lavender and rose flavors, "to get a new taste, pastry chefs all over the world will applaud it."
Author: Jiang Zezhen/Compiler
Editor: Xu Qimin