This was the highlight of my week, maybe even the highlight of my month. I never would have guessed that making my own vanilla would make me so happy.
I recently ran out of my generic target brand bottle of vanilla and I looked into the Nielsen-Massey brand that I see so many content creators using in their baking and coffee syrup making videos. It is $20 for 4oz of this brand of vanilla extract. I’ve been seeing a lot of vanilla paste being used on the internet, but I’ve always been an extract person and I’d have to learn more about why a person would use paste over extract… anyway time for some math.
I bought loose cut vanilla from Slo Food Group, which was $25 for 4oz of beans. Their website has a vanilla extract recipe that suggests .8oz of beans per cup of alcohol. This means that if I rounded up, I could make 4 cups of vanilla (32 oz).
As we know, few things go according to plan and I ended up standing in Sprouts for longer than I would like to admit overthinking which size jar to buy. I wanted to get 2 2 cup mason jars, but of course they only had 1.5 cup jars and 3 cup jars. Obviously the right answer was to panic and buy 3 of the 1.5 cup mason jars. Why was that the answer? I’m still not sure.
In the end my vanilla math looked like this: 3 jars each got 1.3 oz of vanilla (4oz/3jars= 1.33oz) and 1.5 cups of alcohol. This calculates out to .86oz of vanilla beans per cup of alcohol (1.3oz/1.5cups). I did a lot of thinking and planning but in the end I also did a lot of panicking and guessing and really I just got lucky that my ratio ended up being almost exactly what Slo Food Group recommended.
The worst part about having 3 jars is that I bought vodka and bourbon and so I had to decide how to split that up. I now have 2 jars extracting in vodka and one in bourbon. Again this decision was made simply because I could not spend another second debating over which alcohol would get 2 jars.
If you’ve made it this far congratulations! The final calculation, and the main reason I wanted to make my own vanilla was this:
$25(vanilla beans)+$13 (half a bottle of Bluff Springs bourbon)+$21(one full bottle of Summum vodka) = $59
$59 is a lot more than the $20 extract I mentioned at the beginning, but its a lot more appealing to look at the ounces.
$20/4oz = $5/oz for the trendy Neilsen-Massey vanilla extract
$59/37oz = $1.59/oz for home made vanilla extract.
I will be saving a lot of money, but not for about 3 months which is how long they suggest you let your vanilla age/develop. I’ll be back with many updates about my little vanilla babies.
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