How to make Extracts

Extracts are amazingly easy to make.
They are whatever you can stuff into a bottle with alcohol.
The hardest part is waiting for the alcohol to extract the flavor. It is a process that can take weeks or even months.

Homemade extracts

I am attempting to cut down how much sugar I consume, so instead of sugar I use vanilla extract.
Most of my sugar consumption comes from all of the coffee I drink, Long story short ,we go through a lot of vanilla extract. When I deciding to make my own I went with the "go big or go home" approach so I am making a gallon of extract.

For a quality extract you will want a 1 to 4 ratio. For every 4 oz of alcohol you use will need 1 oz of whatever you are extracting.

Vanilla beans are ridiculously expensive ($4 for two beans in most grocery stores). Luckily, if you purchase then in bulk they are cheaper. Beanilla  has really good deals as well as Amazon. For one gallon of extract I needed 10 beans. I found a friend who was willing to split the price of 1 pounds worth of beans (150 beans). Now we each have a "lifetime' supply of vanilla beans.

For citris items like oranges, grapefruit and lemons you will only want the cored part of the rind and not the pithy white part. One way to get it is to grate it, but this is very labor intensive, and unrealistic (personal opinion). I used a very sharp knife and cut went slowly. Any piece that had the white pithy junk was discarded. Please note: no fruit was wasted, all eatable pieces either went in breakfast smothies or to work as snacks,

You can use whatever kind of alcohol you want to extract flavors . I used rum, vodka and ever-clear. The quantity of the alcohol does not matter much for making extracts, so go ahead and get the cheep stuff.
Considering the amount of vanilla extract I was making, I got the cheapest vodka I could.

 Rum has such a strong recognizable flavor.  Think of rum cake around Christmas time. I knew I wanted to try making something with rum,

The ever-clear was an impulse buy, the lady at the liquor store sold me on it. She also makes extracts and it was what she recommended. Or so she said, whatever, I am an easy sell.

In the end what I made was grapefruit with rum, coffee with vodka, basil with ever-clear, rum with orange and vanilla lastly orange with ever-clear.

This picture is one month after being mixed. I am planning on waiting 6 months to bottle everything. I will post an update at that time. Even if the ever-clear being an impulse buy, the basil and the orange were the first to extract the color.

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Keep the jars out of the sun and shake them every now and then. The herbal extracts will be ready within a couple weeks, with this being my first attempt I am going to wait the full 6th months before I strain mine and bottle mine.

I will do a follow up post when the time comes.

If you have made extracts or what to know more about what I have done let me know in the comments below.

By Laura