Vanilla flavoring

I love to cook and today was the day I made my Christmas Frog Eyes [large pearl tapioca]. As I was getting everything ready I found I had to visit the “closet”. This place is where I keep all of my important fishing and hunting stuff but it also hides my stash of home-made vanilla flavoring. Nothing on this earth can compare to this extract. Shillings and Watkins , everything, takes a back seat to this and if you have a person in the house who like to bake or cook and uses vanilla a lot, take time to make them a bottle.

Round up a fifth of Everclear in Iowa. Get the 190 proof. Then buy 5 or 6 whole vanilla beans. Using a single edged razor blade slice the beans length-wise “almost” all the way thru, then slip the beans into the bottle of alcohol. Replace the cap and tighten it down good then wrap the bottle in a brown paper bag and store it in a cool, dark, closet for a year. After the year you can pour the flavoring as needed into a 1/2 pint jelly jar with a lid to keep in the kitchen. The beans stay in the booze jug.

The beans can be spendy….up to $15.00 per bean in local grocery stores but I have found them for as little as $3.00 per bean right here in Minnesota….kinda toward the northern part of the state.

The vanilla you’ll get from this is color neutral and can be used in any recipe without having the staining issues that so many Mexican vanillas are noted for. Angle food cakes made here at home are the purest white when this vanilla is used. My Frog Eyes come out a wonderful cream color.

I keep two bottles in the closet. One is in the making and the other is for using. I never have just one jug in there but often times will have three. When the jugs empty I don’t throw the beans right away. I slip them in the freezer in a zip lock and when we decide to make ice cream we’ll take a couple of the beans and scrape the seeds/pulp out of them and add it to the cream or ilk in the recipe. I have also scraped a bean into a pint of whole milk and heated it gently without boiling for twenty minutes and then use the milk for a malt or milk-shake. But the true beauty of the vanilla you make is in the eyes of the woman using it. Try a batch and you’ll know what I am talking about.

Salli just trys every winter to find someone going to mexico to pick her up a big bottle. Never tried making it ourselves.

Oh….you should. This puts Mexican vanilla right out to pasture.

sounds delicious! what size bottle of ever clear do you buy, to put the beans in? my wife uses imitation vanilla all the time. maybe i could score some brownie pts. after 26 years.:)

I find the ever clear is easiest to locate in the “fifth” size….like in a fifth of whiskey. It comes in Liters too. Its also found in pints but I go larger.

In a smaller bottle, like in the pint, three beans will suffice. And I’ll add that you don’t have to wait a full year to use this, 6 months will be fine but I prefer to wait. If you’re going to try this maybe do two pints and start using the first after six months then you can taste the difference and you can get more to continue when the first bottle is empty. No woman should have to use imitation after 29 years. lol