Ndali vanilla

If you've ever wondered what makes a sponge cake so delicious it's almost certainly down to the vanilla in the recipe which adds a richness and warmth to the flavour. My cousin Lulu Sturdy's vanilla, which she grows at Ndali in Uganda, has been described as the champagne of vanillas and once you taste it you will understand why. When you hold one of the moist, plump vanilla pods in your hand and breath in the heady aroma you will discover the sheer pleasure of finding a fantastic ingredient. It adds the most beautiful flavour to cakes, puddings and biscuits which will inevitably tempt you to want more...

Vanilla is an orchid vine, originally from Central America, and the only one of over 25,000 orchid species to produce an edible fruit. The vine needs to entwine a host tree and at Ndali they grow up mulberry, red hot poker trees and physic nut trees. The intricate vanilla flower has to be pollinated by hand using a pin or whittled stick to carefully lift out of the way the flap (rostellum) which separates the stigma and pollen-bearing anther; thumb and forefinger then gently squeeze these male and female parts together. The delicate work has to be done within eight hours of the flower opening, and has to dodge rain, ants and heavy hands to produce a successful conception.

Like a fine wine vanilla depends on perfect conditions. To flourish and produce truly aromatic beans vanilla needs a leafy tropical environment: plenty of dappled sunlight, buckets of rain, rich loamy soils. The vanilla bean is harvested 9-11 months after pollination: the longer the beans are left on the vine the better. 

As well as showing me her own farm, Lulu took me to visit a couple of the vanilla farms that are part of the huge Fairtrade co-operative she has set up with other farmers in Western Uganda. Her right hand man Sassu introduced me to the families who grow vanilla on these farms and I had a great time being entertained by the children and their billy goats and drinking tea. The difference Fairtrade makes to these farmers' lives is immeasurable. Ndali vanilla's success enables these people to have a quality of life that would be otherwise unobtainable; whether it's improved sanitation, better education for the children or starting up another small business of their own. All of this is achieved through Lulu's aim to build a network of farmers who meet the exacting standards of the Fairtrade certification. These farmers can expect to be paid double the amount of the average vanilla bean, so there is a direct correlation between the success of the Ndali vanilla brand and the lives of the people who live on these farms. You can view Ndali Fairtrade farmers on youtube http://www.ndali.net/youtube.html

We next visited the Ndali vanilla processing plant near where Lulu lives. This is where the vanilla is cured; turning it from the yellowish-green pod to the aromatic fermented chocolate-coloured bean. It takes three to six months and involves blanching the beans in hot water and sweating them in woollen blankets in wooden boxes. Over the weeks they are repeatedly exposed to hot sunshine and returned to their boxes for sweating, encouraging the breakdown of gluco-vanillin into vanillin through fermentation. It's a very time-consuming process and is over-seen by Lulu at every stage. Each bean is  meticulously sorted, graded and kept tightly packed in wooden boxes and the vanilla will continue to mature and improve in flavour much like a fine wine. 

You can buy Ndali vanilla from Waitrose and any quality supermarket and delicatessen in the UK. It comes in the shape of pods, intense extract or a wonderful new powder which is just about to be launched on the market. The glossy, plump vanilla pods that I smelt and touched at the processing plant at Ndali do not lose any of their intensity once they arrive on the shelves of the supermarkets over here and are bursting with flavour. It has been a really amazing journey for me to have tracked the journey of this beautiful and exotic spice back from my kitchen in London to the lush, verdant land below the Mountains of the Moon in Uganda.

www.ndali.net