Making Homemade Vanilla Extract {a DIY Project}
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This is my first time making homemade vanilla extract. It wasn’t hard at all and it tastes SO good! Since it does take a bit of time before it is ready to use, you get to learn some patience too. Now I know most of the recipes you will find online use Vodka as the base to soak the vanilla beans in. My husband just couldn’t bring himself to allow me to go the liquor store (and I wasn’t sure I wanted to anyway!), so I did some more searching and found out you can use food-grade glycerine in place of the Vodka! Yeah! Enjoy the recipe!
HOMEMADE VANILLA EXTRACT
- 4-8 vanilla beans (using more will make the extract stronger faster)
- 3 cups food-grade vegetable glycerine
- 1 cup filtered water
Slit the vanilla beans down the middle and then cut into inch-sized lengths. Put them in a clean quart jar.
Add in the glycerine and water to fill the quart jar. Put a lid on tightly and put the date on the lid.
Shake the jar daily for the first few weeks, then every few days after that (or as often as you remember!).
Allow to sit for 4-6 months.
When ready to use, you can strain out the vanilla beans or leave them in. Leaving them in will allow the vanilla extract to get even stronger as the days go by.
Discard the vanilla beans when you have used up the vanilla. OR you can dry the vanilla beans out, then stick them in a container with sugar to make vanilla sugar!
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Where did I get the ingredients?
Food-Grade Glycerine – I got mine from Azure Standard.
Vanilla Beans – Olive Nation has some GREAT vanilla beans. That is what I used.
