How to Make Homemade Vanilla Extract

Step 1

Set up an immersion circulator and preheat water bath to 146°F (63.5°C). Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez Place the halved vanilla beans in a 1-liter (33.8-ounce) glass jar. Add the vodka to the jar and use a fork or slotted spoon to push the vanilla beans down so that they are completely submerged in the vodka. Seal jar and gently lower into water bath; the water should reach just below the lid of the jar. Set a heavy mug, small bowl (filled with water, if necessary), or other weight on top of the jar to keep it from floating, and cover the top of the water bath with aluminum foil followed by a kitchen towel. Cook for 3 hours. Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez Using tongs, carefully remove jar from water bath (if you don’t want to deal with the hot water, you can also turn off the immersion circulator and let the water cool before removing the jar—this just takes a while). Allow vanilla extract to cool to room temperature (overnight is best). At this point, you can remove the beans from the extract and reserve them for other uses, or you can leave them in the liquid. (I recommend leaving them in the liquid; it’s the perfect place to park them until you need to fish them out for another use, and the flavor of the extract will only get better over time.) Either way, store the extract in a cool, dark place. Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez

Step 2

Lubinsky, Pesach, Séverine Bory, Juan Hernández Hernández, Seung-Chul Kim, and Arturo Gómez-Pompa. “Origins and Dispersal of Cultivated Vanilla (Vanilla Planifolia Jacks. [Orchidaceae]).” Economic Botany 62, no. 2 (2008): 127–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40390612.McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. United States: Scribner, 2007.Editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. United States: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.McGee, Harold. Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells. United States: Penguin Press, 2020.Ehrenberg, Rachel. “Yeast Bred to Bear Artificial Vanilla: Scientists Co-Opt Fungi to Produce Flavor More Efficiently.” Science News 175, no. 11 (2009): 9–9. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20494770.Cicchetti, Esmeralda, and Alain Chaintreau. “Comparison of extraction techniques and modeling of accelerated solvent extraction for the authentication of natural vanilla flavors.” Journal of separation science vol. 32,11 (2009): 1957-64. doi:10.1002/jssc.200800650.Experts from Cornell, Rutgers, and Purdue Universities, and U. of Illinois, provided opinions by e-mail.