See how Chef Alicia Ojeda makes her own vanilla extract. Transcript is

below.

Transcript

Making your own vanilla liquid is quick and easy.

The reason we like to avoid the vanilla that you can typically buy in the store is usually it contains alcohol or glycerin. This way we can make our own pure vanilla liquid that is fresh and delicious and will keep in the refrigerator for up to 3 months.

Typically you see in many recipes that it asks you to split the bean and scrape out the vanilla. Well, this is a very unnecessary step when using a high powered blender.

You can simply trim your vanilla beans, and just slightly take off that little nodule, right at the tip, and then slice your vanilla bean very thin–just by cutting down and through with your knife.

And cut them into small pieces. Like this. And, once cut, simply place your vanilla beans, this was four vanilla beans, into your blender.

And, we are going to add 1 cup of water, for those 4 beans. This proportion is going to give you a very strong vanilla liquid. If you like it to be less strong, you can simply add more water.

Now I only added half the water. And, I am going to put my lid on. And, turn on my Vitamix. I am going to blend briefly and then I want to scrape it down. To get all that liquid gold down into the base of the blender. To get it blended smoothly and not have any large pieces.

Smells so wonderful! Vanilla is definitely seductive and aromatic. It makes a wonderful compliment to many of our sweet dishes.

We are going to re-blend. Now what I am looking for here is that there are no large bits remaining. So I am going to scrape down one more time. And you can certainly make this in larger quantities. However I find that making it fresh is ideal for maintaining it’s strong aromatic flavors.

Okay, so for storage I recommend, using a glass jar to keep your vanilla in the refrigerator, and labeling it and dating it so that you know when you made it to get an idea of how long it is going to last you in your kitchen.

As you can see, some of this vanilla is in the lid so we just want to scrape that out. What I will probably do in here is make myself a smoothie afterwards without rinsing it out so that I can get traces of that vanilla flavor.

Now I just want to pour this into a glass jar. That made exactly 1 cup of vanilla. Now I am going to just scrape this really well and get as much of this vanilla as I can. I find that using this vanilla bean recipe, liquid vanilla, I get a much more flavorful vanilla in my recipes. And, I am not having to subject myself to ingredients like alcohol or glycerin.

So our liquid vanilla can be used just as described in your recipe. Replace it equally for vanilla extract. If your recipe calls for a teaspoon of vanilla extract just use a teaspoon of your homemade liquid vanilla.

Vanilla is very complimentary to our sweet dishes, smoothies, ice creams made with bananas, apples, even a little bit of vanilla in a mango orange juice elixir is wonderful.

So, there you go.