VANILLA HAZELNUT - FLAVORED COFFEE

Notes from the curator

Vanilla is one of the most extraordinary of all flavors! Even the fact that it exists is a near miracle. The only natural pollinators of vanilla flowers are little bees that live only in Mexico. That means most vanilla must be pollinated by hand; a tricky task made trickier by the fact that a vanilla flower blooms for just a single day. Once a flower is pollinated and grows a vanilla pod, the pod still must be cured and carefully dried over a period of months in order to produce the classic vanilla aroma and flavor. It’s a painstaking, time-consuming process, and we owe its discovery to the Totonacs, an indigenous people of Mexico who figured all this out more than a thousand years ago. Much, much earlier than that — several thousands of years ago — ancient people discovered another delicious secret: hazelnuts! Nobody seems to know for sure exactly when or where hazelnuts first appeared, but today most of them grow in Turkey near the Black Sea. Hazelnuts have a distinctive sweet flavor different from any other nut, and like vanilla, hazelnut is a flavor that goes especially well with coffee. And when the two flavors join forces the result is sweet, spicy magic.