Homemade Ground Vanilla Recipe

In my house, we don't use artificial colorings and flavorings if we can help it. That makes standard vanilla extract out of the picture around here, as the local vanilla extract is really artificially flavored vanillin with artificial caramel coloring, among others.

But we do like our vanilla in this house. So I tried making vanilla extract- stuck a whole bunch of vanilla beans in some vodka for a few months (and by now, they've been sitting there for over a year), and all I ended up with was some strong vanilla flavored vodka. In order to actually get enough vanilla flavor into our food with that, I need to use so much that the food ends up being mildly alcoholic, which is especially a problem if you're not cooking the food with the vanilla in it. (Maybe this method of making vanilla extract will work for you the way it works for so many others- for some reason though, it does not work for me.)

I've made vanilla sugar in the past and it works phenomenally well; it has been my standard "go-to" vanilla when I want vanilla flavoring, but we've all but cut out sugar in our diet, so I don't want to keep on relying on vanilla sugar to impart vanilla flavor into my food. 

(I recently ordered coconut sugar with my vitacost reward points- I only needed to pay for shipping- and I want to try making vanilla coconut sugar with that.)

Last time I was in the health food store, I saw a little container of ground vanilla being sold for an insanely expensive amount of money for a teeny tiny little container. That same health food store also sells vanilla beans for a fraction of the cost of the ground vanilla; I told the proprieter of the store that I plan on making my own ground vanilla, that it was incredibly easy, and wasn't worth paying so much money to get something that I could easily make myself for a fraction of the cost. (He and I joke around- he knows about my site and reads it sometimes.) 

Of course, I was kind of talking through my hat- I'd never done it before, never read up on how to do it , just figured it could be done, and that it would be incredibly easy.

Would it be?

Well...

Sorta.

I hadn't realized that vanilla beans aren't entirely dry- they have some moisture in them. Which makes them not grind to a fine powder. 

So no vanilla powder here, but its very easy to make ground vanilla strands, which works just as well as if it were powder. I think, though, that if I'd dehydrated the vanilla beans first, it would have worked even better. So, here's how to make your own ground vanilla.

Deceptively simple. A fraction of the cost of store bought stuff. 

Chemical free. Sugar free. Vanilla.

Ingredients:

Vanilla beans

Instructions:

1. Take your vanilla beans. 

2. With scissors, cut it into one inch chunks.

3. Put the chunks in your coffee grinder.

4. Turn on your coffee grinder. Grind until its all ground up, a minute or two.

5. Take the vanilla out of the machine. (A rubber spatula works best.)

6. Use the vanilla in recipes. You need so little to give a strong vanilla flavor, its laughable. A teeny tiny pinch is probably just as strong as a tablespoon of vanilla extract.

I just used this vanilla to make some incredibly delicious vanilla, apricot, coconut pudding pops. So delicious! (And in case you were wondering, I was planning on sharing that recipe with you as well.)

P.S. I know instructions could have been shortened to "grind vanilla beans in coffee grinder." But that post would have been way too short, it would have been laughable. So I stretched it out instead. But this is so easy that even incredibly busy people can find room in their schedule to make this.

Are you a fan of vanilla in your house? What do you use to impart vanilla flavor to your food? Artificial vanilla? Store bought vanilla extract?  Homemade vanilla extract? Vanilla sugar? Or vanilla powder?
Does this look like something you'd try?
Any idea why my vanilla extract only ended up tasting like vanilla vodka?

Linking up to Wellness Weekend, Fight Back Friday,