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| Can I just write that it's very difficult to take a picture of a shiny bottle! Well at least in an apartment with a point and shoot camera and lots of things to reflect on the glass. :-) |
Pure vanilla extract is an essential ingredient for any baker and purchasing a small bottle of the real thing can be very expensive. It turns out that making your own vanilla extract at home is actually easy and can be more cost affective, especially if you make it in a larger batch.
The first bottle of extract I made was this summer. As I looked into different ways people suggested to make this product, it seems the most common combination was three vanilla beans added to two cups of vodka. I started with this, but after a month of letting the extract age I still had a product that smelled strongly of vodka and only had a hint of vanilla flavor. A bit frustrated that I wasn't getting the results I was wanting and not desiring to throw away what I had started, I decided to add 4-5 more vanilla beans to the mixture. After another month of waiting I had something far closer to a nicely fragrant and well flavored extract that I could actually use for baking.
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| Slicing a vanilla bean. |
Before starting this post I went ahead and researched recipes once again, this time coming upon a site called
Vanilla Review. This site seemed to have far more knowledge about making vanilla extract and ended up confirming what I had figured out this summer... you need a decent number of vanilla beans to make a good extract. Their recommendation is around 30 grams of vanilla beans for every cup of vodka, which is roughly about 8 vanilla beans. They also recommend getting grade B beans, which would be a dried out bean. Grade A would be the plump, moisture rich ones that look beautiful, but in making extract can actually add extra unnecessary moisture. In the end get what you can get. I bought my vanilla beans at the local co-op in the bulk section and didn't have a choice between grade A and B. I did see that
Amazon sells vanilla beans and for a very, very good price, so if you know you are going to make a large batch, they would be a good place to price check. Don't buy your beans at a regular grocery store. They are outrageously expensive. I paid $1.90 per bean, but
Amazon had them around $.75 each when a larger quantity was purchased.
Pure vanilla extract is an essential ingredient for any baker and purchasing a small bottle of the real thing can be very expensive. It turns out that making your own vanilla extract at home is actually easy and can be more cost affective, especially if you make it in a larger batch.
