Vanilla Fever

1843magazine.com

13 pointsmeanie4 comments

My $20 bottle of Madagascar vanilla extract was $50 last time I went to Penzey's. Just an hour ago, I bought a smaller bottle to help me ride out the price storm and noticed the price of that $50 bottle went down to $43. I sure hope it gets down to $20 again soon.

The price of vanilla beans have already dropped and I thought I would just make my own extract but I also thought I only needed one bean to so many ounces of vodka. Turns out, you need many more than that and I just can't justify the price despite what some online recipes may claim.

I have done a ethanol/soxhlet extraction of vanilla beans, and I got vanilla out of it, but no way to quantify how concentrated it was. Do you have any figures that detail what the vanilla bean / oz of vodka ratio should be?

There are recipes online. iirc, it's something like 4 beans to 4oz of vodka for "single fold" extract.

I do one pod per 2oz small bottle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com