History of Vanilla Extraction and Pastes (pates)

The history of vanilla extract (vanilla bean extraction) and the invention of vanilla paste ran even from human pre-history to the post-industrial computer age. From its hanging, rotting (but very aromatic) crawling vines in Mexico where planifolia came from, the scent made Mexicans think to mascerate the pods into a husky pulp with edged rocks and axes or strip and scrape the caviar to collect to make a watery hydrosol for flavor or a gunky paste. 

Aztecs used the sugarless and theobromine-rach cacao plant, itself pollinated by ants, with the base notes of vanilla, pollinated by bees, as a chocolate drink that tasted more like 100% dark chocolate and base notes of vanilla. – Today we actually produce this for some bars in US and Japan (See Aztec Original Drink product)

The Spanish mega-empire of the 16th century found vanilla in Aztec centralized societies, prior to the English privateering raids of the 17th century (which may have also pilfered some Planifolia near Hispanola or Port Royal,) and the Atlantic commerce to the New World saw the introduction of the vanilla to Europe, who sterily and frustratedly tried to plant it around the world of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. 

Finally, Edmond Albius’ bourbon method invention made it possible replace the Mexican bee with a human hand. Thus the most labor intensive crop in the world was inculturated and indoctrinated into Madagascar, and planifola proliferated into major modern production to which Sava, the vanilla coast, still commands the lions share.

Once ethanol alcoholic (sugar cane rum, in other words or crude realistic terms, given where vanilla was grown and sailed) methods were used for “rum arrange” in the Francophone colonies in the 1800’s, French and foreign expats chopped matured and cured vanilla beans into alcohol and left it to sit to create conventional extract. The easy procedure became the most common extraction principal for vanilla flavor to bring it to sweets, desserts, and confectionary. 

England and France were the largest users and America steadily grew in use after the fall of the British empire in global prominence. Eventually in the late 20th century vanilla extract had the largest production base in USA, and after World War II the television and interstate highways and supermarkets with refrigeration made the model of America ripe for vanilla in F&B, as consumer culture skyrocketed through the 60’s up to the 90’s.

After modern laboratories were erected food science became more clinical or chemistry-heavy, with processing and mega-agro commanding vast investment, flavor science and the associated food science labs developed more ways to transmute vanilla flavor profiles with solvents, pressures, heats, and complex networks of connected vessels and cookers and pressure valves, making some modern extract ops in the mid 1900’s resemble the engine room on a steamship more than the corner merchant’s  rum arrange cellar shelf. You had at this point by the 2000’s technpolists extolling the merits of and making promises of totally artificial but true-to-taste lab-made Madagascar-tasting vanilla.

Vanilla turns out to be far more elusive and mysterious in its 230+ molecular compounds, that interact to make the flavor more difficult than science can manage to make frankenfood out of. Finally in the latter part of the 20th century taste-superior extraction methods, ironically more simple and patient but patently difficult, started to become more common, with extractors like Cooks (Lochhead) focusing on quality rather than mechanized profitable mega-production. Cold extraction which still uses solvents but slowly and coldly keeps flavor intact without burning them off was used to make high-fidelity liquid forms of the vanilla scent stick in the brew, so to speak. Very high pressure could also shake out in some sense and expressions more of the taste notes of the Madagascar pods, while cosmetic industries figured out how to scientifically suck out the active ingredients using supercritical CO2 at also low temperatures. 

As technology advanced to the computer modeling age, vanilla molecules and the intricate compounds could be seen, if not ever reproduced in a lab, but extractors and flavor makers developed tech that could take more of the soul of the beans with their brew into the final liquid or at least document what worked best. After 4 decades Indonesia and Uganda were thrust onto the scene of a market they did not understand, applying industrial thinking to an artistic enterprise that nurtured nuances in the taste from the soil to the curing and hand massaging in the fields all the way to the cold, slow, hard process of taking the flavor out of the other side. Soulless mechanization in these copycat countries led to an end vanilla liquid that tasted more like oak trees or runny chocolate sterile juice (as in the case of Ugandan,) or smoky oaky almost coniferous sharp acid (as in the case of Indonesian) as the soul of the vanilla flavor just didn’t transmute out to the final taste.

Tahitian vanilla, itself and island artisan industry nurtured by French abroad, became a different flavor on par with the excellence of Madagascar in its own way, “oranges of Tahitensis to the apples of Madagascar planifolia,” both reaching excellence after experience.