Help, We’re Out of Vanilla!

Pastry chefs are having a hard time. Even despite the sky-high viewing figures for the television baking hit Heel Holland Bakt. First, the price of butter, an indispensable pastry ingredient, went through the roof, and now the price of vanilla is rising too. What now?

We previously wrote about the dire butter shortage, which is threatening, among other things, the croissant’s very existence. But of course, it also affects pretty much the entire pastry display.

Bean-shaped
And on top of that, the price of vanilla is now showing signs of going parabolic. The bean-shaped spice whose inner seeds are used to sweeten pastries now costs around 600 to 750 dollars per kilo. And that’s while, back in 2015, pastry chefs were still paying 100 dollars per kilo for it.

The cause: the cyclone that hit the island of Madagascar, the world’s most important vanilla producer (accounting for around 75 percent of global production). Add to that a few other unfathomable economic processes, plus the fact that in recent years—partly due to government policy—the demand for natural rather than synthetic ingredients has risen enormously. And you have a bingo.

Ice cream, tompouce and pudding rolls from now on without vanilla?

Products directly affected by the shortage of vanilla pods include ice cream, éclairs, pastry cream, pudding rolls, rice pudding, vanilla choux buns and tompouce. And to make matters even worse: some of these products were already victims of the still-ongoing butter shortage.

Synthetic
Of course, you can also prepare all of them with synthetic vanilla (and margarine) from the factory, but that’s not something we should collectively want.

It may well be that the Netherlands suffers less from the shortage because of nedervanille, developed together with Wageningen University, which is being cultivated by an increasing number of Dutch growers. Perhaps nedervanille will save the (pastry) world after all!