The Vanilla Experiment – Next Phase

Time flies!  I recently had a week off work for Manifest, and realised that my vanilla extracts had actually reached the magical 4 week mark where I should be removing the beans from the alcohol.

Uh… ignore the dust.  I stored the bottles on the floor of my pantry where it’s cool, dark and not usually disturbed.  Plus, I have a cat.

What a difference a couple of months make!

Straining the extract is pretty straightforward – I just used my finest mesh strainer, and some damp kitchen cloths.  Can you believe that I’ve not been able to find cheesecloth in Australia?  Not even in fabric shops!  So I’m using these instead.  Just make sure yours aren’t impregnated with some sort of cleaning solution, and that you wash them thoroughly first.

I gently squeezed out the beans to make sure I got all that tawny goodness.

At this point, there was no alcoholic smell to the vodka at all.  Just a warm, delicious vanilla smell – though it wasn’t very strong.  The colour certainly is as dark as other extracts I have, but I’m hoping that the fact that I couldn’t smell it meant that all the flavour is locked inside the liquid!

There was still a heap of vanilla caviar stuck inside the bottles, so I just carefully poured some of the strained extract back in, swirled it around, then strained it out again.

And here we have my liquid gold…  Vanilla extract and vanilla brandy.  The brandy’s smell has completely transformed – it no longer smells like rum and raisin chocolate, but almost like a fine whiskey.  It smells so wonderful, we’ve already been using it up in cocktails (Baileys and vanilla brandy are what the Doctor ordered!) and brandy whipped cream for apple-based desserts.

But now… we wait another two to four months.  In fact, possibly even up to a year for the vodka to fully develop.  I can’t imagine the brandy getting any better, but the thought of it is so exciting, I can barely wait!  In fact, I might go have an ickle tipple right now.

Ciao!