Day 2 Sweet woodruff white chocolate

Galium odorata

This is one of my favourite plants - when I come across little swathes of this in the garden or woodland in May, it lifts my spirit and makes me smile.  It has the most lovely structure to it – these delicate upright swirls of leaves, and the lovely petite ivory white flowers.  It is a relative of cleaver, but does not have its climbing habit, preferring to stay low and spread in gorgeous sweeps across the woodland floor.  It has a mild scent when fresh, but when dried this deepens into a rich vanilla aroma – and is in fact very similar to tonka. 

Tonka beans come from the Amazonian rainforest, and one of the principal chemicals that gives it its character is coumarin, which is exactly the same compound that is in dried Sweet woodruff!  The Caribbean name for the tonka tree was ‘coumarou’ and this gave the compound found in tonka beans its name.

By the 1940s the use of artificial coumarin became widespread and it was used in place of natural vanilla and so found its way into sweets, cakes, drinks and perfumes.  It is still commonly used as a flavour in Germany, and it is one of those lovely things when doing markets when you meet a customer with German connections, especially those that grew up in Germany, and the taste of Sweet woodruff just raises a smile and brings such fond memories for them.

We have ground carefully dried leaves and flowers into a white chocolate (although it is actually green in colour!), and you can really taste the tonka flavour coming through. It is advised not to consume too much coumarin, but there will be negligible amounts in the small square of chocolate in the Advent.  It has a related chemical – dicoumarol – which is more problematic than coumarin – and care needs to be taken when drying Sweet woodruff leaves to ensure they are not wet when you pick them; wait for a dry day. 

In the early 2000s, I was introduced to the world of fresh cream ganaches and origin chocolates through gifted boxes of  Pierre Marcolini, a Belgium based chocolatier.  In his promotional materials that accompanied every box, he seemingly introduced Tonka beans to the western chocolate world. In fact, it was the notion in all this marketing hype, that Pierre Marcolini was on a constant quest to find 'new flavours from all over the world' that sowed the nugget of the idea in my mind - 'why look no further than your nearest hedgerow?' - and slowly the idea of making Scottish wild flavoured chocolates grew. It was with huge delight when I was introduced to our own native Tonka flavour, in this most charming of plants.

We have used the flavour in ganaches, caramels, ground into white chocolate and very successfully in cakes.  For a fully wild dinner I held in the summer this year, I used it to flavour a baked custard made with hazelnut milk - which was utterly delicious.