Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Vanilla Extract

October 18, 2010 by Beth

After yesterday’s bread baking, I also made some vanilla extract. My sister’s been making her own vanilla extract for ages and I decided it was high time I tried it myself! And I have to say – it’s super duper easy! The hardest part was finding the vanilla beans! Seriously, all it takes is a bottle of vodka and some vanilla beans:

You just split the beans in half:

… and throw them in the vodka. Actually, first you need to empty out a bit of the vodka to make room for the beans. You may do with the vodka what you want – I have to drive to hockey tonight, so I just put the extra vodka in an empty jar.

After all the beans were in the bottle – I put 8 beans (which was all they had at the store) in 750 mL of vodka – I poured back some of the vodka from the jar to fill it right up and make sure all the beans were covered

And then you have to wait. And wait and wait. And shake the bottle every once in a while. The longer you wait, the better the vanilla extract. Apparently, as you use up the vanilla extract, you can just add more vodka as the beans have lots of vanilla-y goodness to extract.

And now as I wait for my vanilla to extract, I will think of awesome things to bake that require vanilla!

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