Cacao, food of the Gods, and vanilla, the second most expensive spice in the world, are undoubtedly the sovereigns of the sweet industry. This is why they are often combined for the quintessence of deliciousness.

99% of the time, where there is cacao you will also find vanilla: in chocolate couvertures, in hot chocolate powders, chocolate cake mixes, chocolate bars, spreadable chocolate creams, ice-cream mixtures. There seems to be no escaping vanilla for cacao. They ought to stick together, literally!

But is vanilla truly the best companion for cacao? Is vanilla making chocolate better, or is it actually detrimental to its reputation? Is there a difference in vanilla use and purpose between industrial and craft chocolate?

Let’s discuss.

When did Vanilla first meet Cacao?

Forget the now vanilla-famous Madagascar that produces 80% of all vanilla in the world. History has it that the first people to have cultivated vanilla were the Totonacs of Mexico, located in what would be nowadays Veracruz, the port city on the Gulf of Mexico coast.

The Totonacs considered vanilla a sacred herb and therefore used it as medicine and ritual offerings. But there isn’t any historical trace of them adding vanilla to food or beverages as flavorings. It was only when the Aztecs conquered the Totonacs in 1480 that vanilla first encountered cacao inside their sacred xocolatl cups.

aztec chocolate making — Illustration of an Aztec woman pouring chocolate from one vessel to another to create a froth.

Soon after the conquest of the Totonacs, vanilla became part of those spices brought to Europe in the 15th century. Together with sugar, vanilla made the Spanish royals love cacao beverages despite their bitter taste, while the French started flavoring ice-cream and pastries with it.

It was actually in 1841 in the island of Réunion, a French colony at that time, that the method of hand pollination for vanilla was discovered, and why Madagascar became and still is the primary producer of vanilla.

What does Vanilla actually taste like?

Before jumping into the relationship between vanilla and cacao, it’s important to make something clear: vanilla does not taste sweet. Or at least, not as sweet as we make it to be. The tiny seeds that are collected from the wrinkled black pods have a rather bitter taste to them, with earthy and floral undertones, sometimes spicy, at best creamy in the finest varieties. If you buy a vanilla pod at the supermarket, open it, smell and taste the fresh seeds, “sweet” won’t be among the first adjectives that come to mind.

We believe that vanilla has a sweet flavor only because it is extremely popular in sweet preparations: ice-cream, cookies, pastries, bonbons, milkshakes and all sorts of sweet treats. So we associate where we find vanilla to what vanilla tastes like. In our defense, there aren’t many (or any?) products on the market that give us the chance to taste the authentic taste of vanilla.

Often accompanied by sugar and milk, vanilla is considered a flavoring more than an ingredient celebrated on its own. And because, as we will see later, vanilla also helps to exalts the sweetness of all the other ingredients, it’s only natural that we associate vanilla to a sweet taste. But keep in mind that the perceived sweetness of vanilla in our brain is totally different from vanilla’s real sweetness.

This said, we can find vanilla on the market in many different forms and it’s important to know the differences between them.

Beware of all the types of “Vanilla”

Vanilla always reminds me of Pistacchio di Bronte.

Pistacchio di Bronte is a premium kind of Italian pistachio harvested only 2 times a year, by hand, in an area of 1500 hectares around the province of Catania (Sicily). In 2021, its production counted only 2100 tons, but everywhere you go in Italy any pistachio in ice-creams, spreadable creams, nut mixes or desserts is (misleadingly) labelled as “di Bronte”.

The same scenario is true for vanilla.

craft chocolate vanilla — Not all vanilla on the market is made from the actual vanilla pods.

Total worldwide production of vanilla is about 2000 metric tons, which is a drop in the ocean when it comes to the market’s hunger for this unique spice. The vast majority of the vanilla-flavored products on the supermarket’s shelves don’t actually contain real vanilla, but some sort of extract, derivative or imitation.

Even on the ingredient’s list of a chocolate bar you can find vanilla written in different ways depending on how it was processed. To clarify:

Whole Vanilla Beans = these are the fresh seeds taken out of the vanilla pods. This is the most natural and expensive option that leaves visible tiny black seeds when added to food.

Vanilla Bean Paste = less laborious and expensive than vanilla beans, vanilla paste is simply made of the scraped seeds of a vanilla pod suspended in a thick extract.

Vanilla Extract = the most popular option in baking, vanilla extract is made by taking the fresh vanilla seeds and soaking them in a solution of alcohol and water. The cheapest versions will also include sugar, corn syrup or dextrose.

Imitation vanilla/Vanillin = this can be considered the artificial version of vanilla and is the absolute cheapest option on the market. Made from specific oils and woods instead of vanilla pods, this flavoring contains only synthetic vanillin, lacking the remaining several hundreds flavor compounds that give natural vanilla its aromatic complexity.

How does Vanilla affect the taste of chocolate?

Vanilla has such a strong, recognizable and unique flavor that attentive chocolate tasters can identify its presence in chocolate at first smell, before even biting.

Since vanilla is so powerful (especially when it comes in synthetic lookalikes), it covers a lot of defects that the chocolate may have. This comes in hand for mass-produced, industrial and cheap chocolate, where the cacao beans used are of the lowest possible quality. We are talking about defected, molded, badly fermented beans, carrying with them very unpleasant flavors like burnt rubber, smoked meat, mold and vinegar. If sugar helps distracting our palate from any off flavor, it is actually vanilla that does most of the legwork. This is why you will rarely find chocolate sold at a low price tag that doesn’t contain vanilla in it, even at high cacao percentages. Together with dreadful roasting temperatures, vanilla is the second biggest helper in masking the bad quality of cheap cacao.

Vanilla doesn’t only help covering up unpleasant cacao flavors, but it also enhances the sweetness of chocolate.

Vanilla in chocolate covers defects, enhances sweetness and reduces bitterness.

You know how salt, even though it sounds counterintuitive, exalts the sweetness in chocolate? The same way behaves vanilla, enhancing the sweetness perception of baked goods and other sweet treats even if it doesn’t taste sweet in itself. This is why vanilla is also used strategically in the food industry to replace part of the sugar content in certain products, while still delivering a delicious taste.

Vanilla also lowers the perception of bitterness. For this reason, it is widely used in foods that focus on proteins (like protein powders and protein bars), in plant-based mylks, and all those products where there is a need to tone down the harsh flavor of certain ingredients.

It’s clear that vanilla does a good deal of enhancing, masking and tweaking to the original flavors of a product. So how is vanilla perceived in the craft bean-to-bar chocolate industry, where the natural flavors of cacao are meant to be highlighted, preserved and minimally altered?

In this particular niche of the chocolate industry, vanilla has started to make enemies.

Vanilla, The Villain in Fine-Flavor Chocolate?

In the fine chocolate industry, vanilla is often at the center of big debates.

The majority of craft bean-to-bar chocolate makers agrees that vanilla doesn’t belong to fine chocolate. The goal of fine chocolate is to let the natural flavors of each cacao variety and origin shine through without interferences. These include delicate and subtle tasting notes that are carefully preserved and sought after during the chocolate making process.

Roasting is kept at gentle temperatures. Refining is minimal. Conching is carefully timed. All these efforts just to showcase the most authentic nuances of a specific type of cacao in each chocolate. Because of its strong flavor, vanilla tends to suffocate and suppress a big deal of these prestigious flavors that professionals spent so much time bringing to the surface. This is the main reason why vanilla is considered at best unnecessary and at worst detrimental: it defeats the purpose of fine-flavor chocolate.

However, not every craft chocolate professional agrees.

To be fair, there are also some skilled and respected chocolate makers that do add vanilla to their creations. These are award winners, sorcerers of very fine cacao, and attentive artisans, therefore not necessarily professionals that look to use vanilla to cut corners.

They see vanilla as a complementing flavor that add to the aromatic complexity of chocolate, and can be an advantageous companion to the natural tasting notes of cacao. There are no extracts, vanillins, fake or diluted vanilla products involved in this kind of creations. When you find craft bean-to-bar chocolate on the market with vanilla, it’s usually the finest whole vanilla beans that are used.

However, the general sentiment is that the strong (and often more synthetic than natural) taste of vanilla can only do damage to the delicate cacao flavors. In dark chocolate, where cacao is supposed to be the protagonist, vanilla is absolutely rejected (unless it’s a special inclusion on its own and not a staple ingredient of the entire assortment of dark chocolates). In milk, white and mylk chocolate, where the focus is a delicious and sweet experience, vanilla is actually a common ingredient even in the finest creations, as it is considered an enjoyable extra layer of flavor.

It is also worth noticing that vanilla is so engrained in the chocolate world that it is very present in chocolate couvertures (the big bags of chocolate chip/drops ready to be melted). In fact, I personally noticed that chocolatiers that decide to start making their own chocolate from scratch will often add vanilla to their new bean-to-bar creations, as a heritage from the use of couvertures, until they realize that the fine cacao they use doesn’t need the addition of vanilla, and that vanilla is actually not well accepted by the most demanding fine chocolate tasters.

Vanilla and cacao have a long history together, but is this relationship heading towards a breakup soon?