Pompona Vanilla is an extremely rare species of vanilla, and ours is wild-harvested in the Peruvian Amazon. You've never had vanilla like this before, a beautiful combination of flavors from bitter and chocolate-y to dried cherry and dark rum. A slight bitterness is characteristic of Pompona vanilla and represents some of the flavor compounds found in Pompona that you don't find in standard Planifolia vanilla.
We have an extremely limited quantity of full Pompona Vanilla pods. 1 Grade A Pod comes in a biodegradable, sustainably grown bamboo tube.
These vanilla pods are 3-5 times the size of your typical vanilla, so feel free to cut into segments or scrape only a portion of the pod at a time, then put it back in the tube until you need it next.
Highlights
Ingredients
Vanilla pompona pod
Cooking tips
- Cut or scrape a piece into homemade ice cream, desserts and pastries
- Drop a segment into your cold brew or oatmeal
- Scrape into jams and pastry creams
SOURCING
If a regular vanilla pod is like a string bean, Pompona Vanilla is like a sugar snap — bigger, fatter, sweeter and fuller of flavor.
These incredibly rare, wild (literally and figuratively) pods come from the Peruvian Amazon. Wild vanilla is virtually unheard of, and impossible outside of vanilla's native range, from Mexico to northern South America.
Vanilla orchids are only pollinated by a couple of species of bee, which only live in the Americas. All commercial Vanilla planifolia (most of which is grown in Madagascar) has to be hand-pollinated by the farmer once per year when the flowers bloom for just 3-5 hours.
Pompona Vanilla is pollinated by a single species called the dilemma orchid bee (amazing) and is then either picked green and cured by hand by 3 foragers over about 6 weeks, or ripened and split on the vine.