The taste of the world
Vanilla!
Vanilla, treasure from the vanilla cellar of the Roellinger grocery store.
© RFI/Clemence Denavit
By: Clémence Denavit Follow
3 mins
There must be some magic in these flowers for the vanilla to seduce every living soul!
The savage, discovered centuries ago by the Toltecs in the state of Vera Cruz in Mexico – they used it then to bring a little sweetness to their raw and full of character cocoa – has kept the secret of its cultivation for more than three centuries after its first trip to Europe and the revelation: to have a pod, it was necessary to pollinate the flower and replace the famous bee to allow nature to offer us this gift.
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Vanilla has traveled to Madagascar, Reunion, Tahiti, Uganda, New Caledonia, or even the Comoros or Tonga, but a living and agricultural raw material, it cannot be cultivated in quantity and the pods harvested are so many treasures.
The land where its vine takes root will give it its character, the hand of the man who refines it, dries it in the sun and takes care of it, will reveal its perfume and its taste.
Salty-sweet, vanilla dresses the sugars, impregnates the cream, the butter, the fat with its perfume and its flavor, like the flowers from which the concrete is made in perfumery.
It will surprise married to a fish, a lobster or a scallop shell, and has melted for decades the children of the world, their parents before them.
A delicate, surprising, enveloping vanilla, it changed the course of the life of our guest, pastry chef and chocolatier Luis Roblebo Richards: “
The first time I tasted real vanilla from Vera Cruz, it was like a bang!
A revelation !
I was 15, I can say that there was a before and an after
”.
From left to right: Ximena Velasco, director of the Que Gusto festival, Luis Robledo Richards, chocolate pastry chef and Clémence Denavit of Taste of the World.
© RFI/Cécile Bonici
Luis Robledo Richard
founded
"Tout chocolat"
, a chocolate pastry shop.
He has 3 shops in Mexico, he is also the author of Larousse del Chocolate.
Ximena Velasco
is the director of the
Que Gusto
festival .
The 8th edition of the festival
is held from Saturday June 11 to June 19, 2022.
In this program, a detour through Reunion and the municipality of Bras Banon where the artisanal pollination of vanilla flowers is explained to us by Emmanuelle Etale, communication director of the
Provanille cooperative
in Reunion.
Report in The vanilla cellar of the Roellinger grocery store is located in Paris, 51 rue Sainte Anne à l'Épicerie.
It is one of the few if not the only vanilla cellar in Europe.
You can discover the different vanillas and learn about the culture of this particular orchid.
The cellar can be visited, for more information:
Spices Roellinger
and
Taxons Vanilles.
Report by Clémence Denavit with Romain Coeur as guide.
VANILLE CAVE Grocery ROLLINGER .
Clemence Denavit
The vanilla cellar, Roellinger grocery store, rue Sainte-Anne.
© Benoit Teillet/Roellinger
In links:
-
French pastry
in Taste of the World
-
Geography of plants at the Mexican Cultural Center in Paris
-
The journey of plants and the great discoveries
, by José E. Mendes Ferrao, published by Chandeigne editions
-
Vanilla
, by Christophe Adam, published by La Martinière
-
Mayotte the agricultural challenges of the island of perfumes
, by Igor Strauss.
Musical programming
Mi terra Veracruzana
by Nathalie Lafourcade
WATER IT
by JACQEE
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