DIY Vanilla

Every oleh has that one purely frivolous and completely unnecessary product that they still import from the Old Country.

You know what I’m talking about, right?

{looks around hopefully for some nodding heads but then remembers that bloggers can’t actually SEE their readers…}

It’s nothing that you actually NEED. And you realize that you could either manage perfectly well without it or else switch to the Israeli equivalent.

But so far, it hasn’t come to that.

Because thanks to the kind efforts of your friends and family in the Diaspora, you still have a ready source for the product, and so you haven’t yet had to make alternate arrangements.

(In our case, that product is American colored sprinkles - for recipes such as these nameless bars. How about you?)

But if your relatives have been sending you vanilla extract*, now’s the time to tell them to stop.

*Note: Vanilla extract is widely available here in Israel. But the thing is that it’s rather expensive… </note>

I mean, if you do a search for “homemade vanilla,” you’ll discover that over a million and a quarter websites claim that there’s nothing to it.

And surprisingly, they all happen to be right…

Homemade Vanilla Extract

Ingredients

• 1 liter vodka
• 4 vanilla beans, cut up

Directions

Drop the vanilla beans into the bottle of vodka. Close bottle, and store in a cool, dark spot for a month (or two or three or however long it takes you to finally go out and buy an appropriate small glass bottle). Strain vanilla and pour into a smaller bottle. (Leave the rest in the larger bottle together with the vanilla beans.) Enjoy!

A bottle of vodka with vanilla beans inside

 Several months later

Straining the vanilla with a coffee filter and a funnel

The finished product

Do you make your own vanilla extract?