Amanda Richards

I love to give homemade gifts for Christmas presents. One of my favorites to make is vanilla extract. Now is the time to make vanilla, as it needs to sit for about 6 weeks. I buy a pound of beans and keep them in an airtight bag and store the bag inside a sealed canning jar. Buying your vanilla beans in bulk is much more economical than at the grocery store, where two beans goes for about $12 dollars. It may pay to shop around for a good price—the price has jumped this year due to a bad harvest in Madagascar. You can compare prices online, and there are also reports that Costco and Trader Joe’s sometimes have vanilla beans at a good price.

How to Make Vanilla Extract

1 bottle of inexpensive vodka or rum
As many vanilla beans as can fit inside the bottle (10–30)!

Pour out a couple of ounces of liquor from the bottle, retain it in a glass.

Slice each vanilla bean from top to bottom in half. (Tip: Pierce the vanilla bean with a sharp knife and pull the bean, rather than pulling on your knife.)

Push the beans into the bottle until you cannot fit anymore beans..

Add enough liquor back into the bottle to completely cover the beans.

Let sit for 6 weeks, shaking every couple of days. You will see the liquor become a gorgeous dark brown.

After 6 weeks, decant the vanilla into small gift-sized bottles. I like to put on a nice label.

I’ve found that the beans still retain a lot of seeds after the first decanting, so I usually add another bottle full of liquor and let it sit for a few months. This extract won’t be as potent as the first decant, so I double the amount in my recipes.

Have vanilla beans left?

Put a whole bean in a container of sugar, let sit for a week or two and voila, you have vanilla sugar. A special treat for your morning coffee.  Another nice, easy gift to package for a gift.

Make homemade ice cream to top off your apple pie!

Top ^