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Local Vanilla Passes Taste Test

A Little Havana chocolatier tries homegrown South Florida vanilla.

October 05, 2021

Vanilla orchid climbs up the trunk of a palm at Miami Beach Botanical Garden

Sea salt caramels sound like an unlikely part of a scientific experiment. Exquisito Chocolates owner Carolina Quijano was asked to participate in a field test, to use vanilla extract made from pods grown in the Redland in a batch of her bonbons to assess its flavor.

“I’m not a vanilla connoisseur,” admits the chocolatier. “We’re trying to highlight the cacao.” Her company handcrafts bean-to-bar chocolates from imported cacao beans that they roast, grind and turn into delectable candies.

Quijano was asked to participate in the test by Dr. Alan Chambers, a tropical plant geneticist at UF/IFAS Tropical Research and Education Center in Homestead, who has been researching the viability of growing vanilla in South Florida since 2015. Eighty percent of the world’s supply of the popular – and valuable – flavoring comes from Madagascar, followed by Indonesia and Mexico. How valuable? Experts place the crop value of an acre of vanilla at $150,000, compared to $3,400 for an acre of sweet corn. For local farmers and even backyard gardeners, this could be a boon.

Carolina Quijano with bon bons made with local vanilla.

Chambers and his team have been identifying, collecting, breeding and testing vanilla cultivars in order to select the best vanilla plant out of their entire collection, working with Vanilla planifolia, Vanilla x tahitensis, V. mexicana and V. pompona. A key flavor indicator is vanillin content, which ranges from 1.5 to 3 percent in a traditional bean. In Chambers’ beans, the vanillin content was 3.5 percent, indicating a quality that exceeds industry standards.

What’s local worth to you? From a flavor perspective, the experiment with Exquisito Chocolates succeeded. Quijano found the vanilla to be fragrant and aromatic, noting that using a local product would also pique consumers’ curiosity and get their attention. For Chambers, this real-world application furthers his mission of giving local growers a new product.

“My job is to support local agriculture,” he says. “The experiment was a success and a win-win in our next steps to identify a viable South Florida crop for commercial and home growers Being able to use a cultivar with desirable traits that is virus-free and has a higher vanillin content than the worldwide average, makes this a desirable crop for South Florida.”

FOR MORE INFO

Interested in growing your own vanilla? Growers and homeowners can check out Dr. Chamber’s site, which includes a growing guide, a video on hand-pollination and information about curing: tropicalfruitbreeding.com/vanilla

Sunshine State Vanilla sells plants for growers: sunshinestatevanilla.com