Homemade Vanilla Bean Paste

Let’s make this amazing Vanilla Bean Paste at home with just 5 ingredients! And once you go paste, you don’t go back to extract!

A few weeks ago, I saw a video by Beth from Gneiss Spice about making your own Vanilla Bean Paste. So I immediately went to her online store and bought a bag of chopped vanilla.

It has been a delight and absolute thrill to make my own vanilla bean paste at home, because I simply can’t get enough of the stuff. Seeing bits of the vanilla bean ‘caviar’ speckled in your food is just *chef’s kiss*! And there’s plenty of recipes where extract doesn’t just have the same oomph as bean paste!

It feels almost a crime how easy it is to make something that’s so decadent! Somehow it feels like you didn’t earn it! LOL! But it really is just as easy as plopping all the ingredients, ALL 5 of them – vanilla, water, vodka, sugar and xantham gum – into a blender and hitting the ‘blend’ button.

Did you know this about Vanilla?

This particular vanilla blend is mixed-origin – as in, it’s grown and sourced from 3 different countries, each with its own flavor profile. Madagascar vanilla has that classic vanilla flavor – sweet & creamy, whereas vanilla grown in India has a smoky, almost chocolaty flavor, and Indonesian vanilla has a woody, subtly spicy taste. When different kinds of vanilla are mixed together, it creates a multi-dimensional flavor that hits a lot of beautiful notes.

Almost like immigration, don’t you think?

Did I just make vanilla political? Why, yes, yes I did!

What can I say, food has always been political and it keeps coming up.

And whoever thought to use the word Vanilla to mean boring never looked into how difficult it is to grow them. Did you know it takes about 9 months for a vanilla pod to mature? That’s a full human gestation period! And because of the nature of the crop – low yield, high profit, they can’t leave it up to nature, so it’s almost always exclusively hand-pollinated – as in, a human being goes around from flower to flower making sure the pollen gets to where it needs to in order to fruit a vanilla bean. And speaking of flower – did you know that the vanilla bean is the fruiting body of a type of orchid plant? The first ever time that I saw a vanilla bean on its plant was in the Atlanta Botanical Gardens Conservatory and it made me as giddy as a toddler!

Let’s bottle it up!

Once you’ve managed the very difficult process of blending the 5 ingredients *please note the intense sarcasm* the next task is to figure out where to put them. And that’s where ALL the glass bottles you’ve been hoarding for no reason comes in. You DO hoard glass bottles like me, don’t you? No?

Well, you should.

Glass is almost infinitely recyclable, but my local trash collection agency doesn’t take glass, so we have to collect ours and drop it off at a designated site periodically. But I save the good looking and uniquely shaped ones for homemade gifts and the uniform sized, frequently purchased, same-brand ones for pantry organization, like the Santa Cruz peanut butter jars for spices and the growler jugs we buy peach cider every year in for lentils.

Once you sanitize them, and make sure the lids aren’t chipped, cracked or stained, it is good to go. I run them through the dishwasher twice and air dry them before storing them for a rainy day. In the summer, it also helps to leave them out in the hot sun for an afternoon for that extra UV sterilization.

Homemade Gifts are making a comeback

I love that homemade gifts are making a comeback again in this era of hyper-consumerism. These vanilla jars may have cost you just over $6 for a 4oz jar to make, but there’s a certain charm to something homemade with thoughtfulness, care and affection that I’d enjoy both giving and receiving.

The basket here was thrifted, and the gifts (except the Belgian chocolate box) made by and purchased from small businesses. To me, that’s special. And I truly hope the recipients feel the same way too!

Don’t forget the labels!

If the idea of bottling your own vanilla bean paste at home thrills you, you’re gonna wanna fancy it up with some labels. I’m no artist, but I made these labels for myself, and they’re yours to use, if you like them. So go ahead and download these Vanilla Bean Paste Labels to print for yourself!

It’s a 2″ square each and fits a 4oz bottle well.

I haven’t yet figured out a way to print them on label paper – I’ll have to go find  a local printer who would be nice enough to do just a single sheet – but if you know of a way, I’d love to learn (and so would a lot of others!), so please leave a comment with the info.

But until then, this hack with parchment paper and tape (as shown in the video) would have to do. PLEASE DON’T USE WAX PAPER. It sticks to the tape.

When you make this amazing Vanilla bean paste (which I really think you SHOULD!), be sure to SHARE YOUR PHOTOS with me through Facebook or Instagram. I’d love to see what you make from here!