Making the best Vanilla Extract you have ever tasted.

hi and welcome to Apple cottage this is sandy app early today we're going to talk about making vanilla when you buy vanilla in the store it's not always pure vanilla a lot of times it'll contain sugars additives and even flavorings to make it taste more vanilla more like vanilla but I've been taking vanilla for probably the last 10 15 years I loved making it as gifts I sell it at the farmers market and a lot of people have asked me how I make it so I always tell them at the market it's how easy it is to make but I thought today I would show you the first thing to consider is do you want to make vanilla with alcohol or non alcohol that's just a personal personal preference I use alcohol because I think it just makes a great smooth vanilla that the alcohol is such a good preservative it will last a really long time a little bit of history about vanilla most people say originally came from Mexico but you can write now they grow vanilla in Mexico the Bourbon islands Tahiti Indonesia India Uganda Madagascar Papua New Guinea all vanilla is hand pollinated so if somebody would tell you that there was a problem with the bees and that's why vanilla cost so much that's incorrect all of it is hand pollinated it takes about Oh anywhere from 12 to 14 weeks is the pollination period so that people are coming back and forth to the vanilla plant if you make it with alcohol it doesn't have to be expensive alcohol you can use vodka which I usually use you could use a grain alcohol or some people use a room a spice drum so today I'm going to make a couple darts with spiced rum I've never made it before but I understand that the flavour is wonderful so I'm gonna try that if you wanted a non-alcoholic vanilla that you can use for cooking you would use a food grade vegetable glycerin this is simply a sugar alcohol that is made with plants and I have a big jug here and it's just a vegetable on glycerin it's a food grade so of course you can ingest it I just personally that's just not what I want to do that's not what I use my um glycerin for now after you make the mixture you have to decide on a couple other things some people put more beans in there and they just let it sit for two months you know they might go shake it at once a week and after two months they're using it which is fine some people will store it in a cool dry place for three to six months also fine but when I make my vanilla extract I use alcohol and I let it sit bare minimum eighteen months if it gets to 24 months I'm even happier if I still have some of it left here's a jar that I made in December 17th so it's almost two years old this is the most perfect vanilla extract you will ever taste I use Madagascar beans from Madagascar I love the flavor of it and really honestly you can say that it's probably honestly probably that's funny at least three times as strong as regular vanilla so when I'm baking because this is what I use all the time I would use when it if it says 1 teaspoon I'm using a third of a teaspoon unless I want something just really enhanced with the vanilla flavor if it's 3 teaspoons you're putting in the recipe I'm only putting one in but that is because I have let it marinate in the alcohol for almost two years and so it gives you this strong rich vanilla flavor there are people that will mix both the alcohol and the glycerin together I don't do that some people will use the glycerin part glycerin and part water those are choices that people make I just I just think that even if you're not a drinker you abstain from alcohol a teaspoon of vanilla in a batch of cookies I'm still okay with that but those are personal preferences it's not right it's not wrong it's just the way it is okay so if you've ever gone to buy vanilla beans in the store extremely expensive but that's just the way it is several years ago there was a lot of weather conditions around the world and the vanilla bean production was really low and at that time the vanilla beans jumped in price and I could understand that you know sometimes any crop can have a failure but they never brought those prices back down it's still crazy prices so the more you buy the cheaper they get so if you can go together with several people and all of you are making 10 jars your price will go down and then then it's very much more economical but really even with the price here I bought a package and had 25 vanilla beans in it because I let mine sit for basically two years I only have to put two and a half the Nilla beans in each pint jar and it will still get triple that strength so I already have a few I cut them in half and then I cut each one lengthwise so let's do that with these last ones so I'm pulling the last of them out if you haven't really seen a vanilla bean this is about what they look like and once in a while to be a little shorter sometimes it'll be a little bit longer these are about six inches long and so what I do on my cutting board I first cut them in half so now I have twelve pieces and then I take my knife and I'm gonna slice straight down through there so let me do that on my cutting board I don't go all the way through if by accident I do is not a problem but I wanted to show you all those camera will focus all those beautiful vanilla beans so what I do I'm going to put two and a half whole vanilla beans in there so I'm gonna put five pieces in there so I'm just slicing them and putting them in the jar and when I buy 25 vanilla beans that is enough for me to make ten jars of vanilla and those are pint jars and so that is just awesome to me but the reason I cut them open is because I want the alcohol and those seeds of the vanilla where the real flavor is to just permeate all through the alcohol so let me get my very last jar filled up with vanilla so all of these are cut and so I place all five of them in one of the jars slide that down a little bit now this is just some vodka I got at my local liquor store when you don't really drink going into the liquor store it's really an interesting phenomenon because I just don't drink I make wine I make Mead but rarely do I drink it other than just to taste it when I'm done it's just you know it's just the way it is so you go into that liquor store and everybody you know knows you don't drink and I live in a fairly small town there's 30,000 but a lot of people that live in Gillette it's always I'm not gonna run into anybody I know in here and then I make myself laugh so but what I'm gonna do I take the little cap that's on on here just because it bubbles when it comes out and I don't want it to so then I'm just gonna literally just fill this whole pint jar up basically until you get to this rim right here okay so it really is giving me one inch of head space and what I'm going to do is I'm going to fill those all up but I did want to try some spiced rum I had seen this on a video I never even thought about using a spiced rum in my vanilla but they said it just tasted phenomenal and so I thought well it's gonna give it a little bit of spice in there besides the vanilla it could be real interesting when I'm making frosting or cake adding it to whipped cream so I thought why not I'll try it so I've already taken off this little white thing that's always I guess on the top of liqueur and exactly the same thing I am gonna fill it all the way up so there's only about a head in an inch head of space that way when I shake it up it can move around easily but see the difference now this looks like it's almost ready it's not ready it stills gonna take two years then you have some choices when it goes to putting your lids on now you can buy these little caps that go on the top of mason jars they have two sizes the narrow small size and then the wide mouth size because I'm using the small ones here I just bought a package of these cost a couple dollars at Walmart and so if you use an these really all you have to do is cap it but I've always liked putting a little piece of wax paper so I just put that on fasten it as tight as I can hand tighten it because I don't want it to leak because every day for about a week I'm going to shake it then I'm gonna move to about at least once a week sometimes I'll do it twice a week for a couple weeks and it's not until it's about four months old that I'll just go to once a month shaking it and it's really interesting because the vanilla beans will start to come out the colors will start to change I like to sometimes open it and just see how vanilla how much vanilla is its flavor at it so far and then of course you're gonna take a marker and you're gonna write vanilla the month in the year because I am keeping it for sure for eighteen months before I ever use it or ever give it away or sell it at the farmers market so then I know exactly especially when I have different ones going on at the same time I don't want to mix them up and sell it to somebody and it's not that strong rich vanilla flavor the other way you can do it because it when you buy a box of candy jars it's gonna come with the lid in the ring now I don't want it to touch anything metal so I'm gonna put I'm gonna take that I'm gonna put my wax paper on top put my lid tighten it down so then when I shake it nothing is gonna come out nothing's gonna leak and nothing is gonna touch that metal and so I will do the same thing with the rum as I'm doing with the the vodka for two basically two weeks every single day I'm going to shake them after that'll be once or twice a week and then about the four month period it'll just be once a month when I go down to the pantry and I'm getting something I'll just shake the whole case of so this is just fabulous vanilla so much cheaper than you could ever buy in the store and the quality is so much better it's easy thing to do one of the other things I'm gonna do I'm gonna make some raspberry brandy that from raspberries that I grew out in my garden I have this little patch of raspberries it's about 8 feet by 8 feet by about 11 feet it's kind of a triangle shape has a little tiny pond inside there when I started I had six raspberries three of them died the first winter because in Wyoming it's cold and but those other three have over the the last 12 years have multiplied so much and I usually get I usually freeze about 90 cups of raspberries from that little tiny area it's crazy so I'm gonna do that and I'll do a video it's really easy it'll be a short video so I'll show you how to do that and one of my other videos that's gonna be coming up is I am going to make some of my skin SAP and I'm also gonna make some lotion using those same herbs that I use in my skin cell so I hope you appreciate it try some vanilla makes them it takes a long time before it's really that great vanilla flavor so start it now you can order vanilla beans on Amazon you can order anything on Amazon so um thanks for watching and this is Sandi at Apple Cottage

Channel: SuburbanHomesteaderWY-AZ

Views: 1,078,580

Rating: 4.9472923 out of 5

Keywords: homemade, vanilla, extract, gifts, Suburban Homesteader WY, Vanilla Extract, Best Vanilla

Id: My74LL1qYE4

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 18 2019