Make Your Own Vanilla

If you're like us, you LOOOOOVE vanilla and appreciate the real thing over the imitation stuff. If you're like us, you're going to be downright giddy to learn that you can make your own real vanilla at home.

First things first, you're going to need to take a quick trip to the store and buy yourself some liquor - vodka that is. We personally chose to use Skyy Vodka for three simple reasons, listed in the order of their importance....

1. We think the blue bottle is really pretty.

2. It's recommended to use a dark bottle when making your own vanilla, so the beautiful blue 'sky' fits that bill perfectly.

3. It's not the cheapest vodka, but it's not super expensive either, so it's a nice middle of the road choice. We don't want to skimp on taste or quality when it comes to making our own vanilla.

Luckily, we've got family that orders from Frontier, so we can get natural and organic vanilla beans for only 85 cents a bean...

Then using a knife, we cut each bean lengthwise - just enough to open it and expose the magic "beans" inside. This releases the vanilla flavor........

Then we drop around eight beans into the bottle...

Can you see them in there?




More importantly, can you smell them?

Ummmm.......


Every week or so, pick up the bottle and give it a shake, shake, shake and in six months you'll be ready to use this vodka as real vanilla. The longer the beans steep, the stronger the vanilla will be. We try to hold out for a whole year because we want monstrous vanilla flavor. Rumor has it that once the year is up, you can take the beans from the bottle and recycle those beans, using them for your next bottle - supposedly the flavor is still there. THAT is some seriously powerful beans! Magic beans!


So, go get yourself some vanilla beans and vodka and make some magic today!