Steenbergs Organic Vanilla Pod

Steenbergs Organic Vanilla Pod is a premium spice from Madagascar. It is packed with rich floral flavours and a sensuous aroma. Vanilla is used in baking and dessert-making. It also goes surprisingly well with fish and seafood.

High quality organic vanilla pods are deep brown or black, long and narrow and somewhat wrinkled. They are moist, supple and immediately fragrant, with longitudinal ridges. Our vanilla pods are from the same growers as used for the Organic Fairtrade Vanilla Extract.

The best organic vanilla pods often have a white frosting, called givre, This is vanillin crystallizing on the surface of the pod, so don’t worry about this, it is a sign of quality rather than mould.

Axel’s Tasting Notes: Pungent; floral, dried fruit, maybe prunes, creamy, and hints of licorice.rich, mellow, intensely perfumed aroma with hints of liquorice or tobacco matched by a delicate, fruity or creamy flavour.  Steenbergs organic vanilla may also have hints of raisin or prune or smoky, spicy notes.

Food Pairing: Fruits – apples, pears, rhubarb, peaches; Milk – Ice cream, panna cotta, custard, Norwegian cream; Fish and shellfish.

More about Vanilla

Vanilla is from the seed-pods of a fragrant climbing orchid, Vanilla planifolia. It originates from Mexico but the best vanilla comes from Madagascar.

Vanilla has large, flat tear-shaped leaves ranging from 8 – 25 cm long. Vanilla planifolia has a slightly fragrant, pale greenish flower, which is about 10 cm wide. The pods develop to look like a green bean, reaching 10 – 25cm in length.

It’s the post-harvest process that develops the complex flavour profile of vanilla:

• The tasteless green beans are laid in boxes and put into a boiling water or a wood-fired kiln to start the curing and drying process, during which the many volatile oils develop via natural enzymatic processes.
• After an initial boiling or about 24 hours in the kiln, the vanilla beans are spread out into the sun to absorb the heat, then at the end of the day, they are wrapped in blankets or straw mats and laid out to sweat on multi-tiered racks in a large shed or in the eaves of a family’s house.
• The vanilla beans are processed like this each day for several weeks till the beans become a deep brown.
• The vanilla beans enter a 3 month conditioning period. Every few days, the vanilla beans are massaged either in a circular (for Madagascan vanilla) or lengthways mode (for Indian vanilla) to create a more flexible pods. This is why they’re supple, because they’re literally massaged daily!

Like saffron, the yields are small – 5 kg of fresh green beans yields about 1 kg of cured vanilla after 9 months of processing.

The flavour of vanilla is from vanillin plus over 250 additional trace chemicals. It’s the subtle variations in these chemicals that creates the individuality of a Steenbergs Organic Vanilla Pod. No scientist can duplicate the individuality of vanilla.