Vanilla Mother

Somehow I came across this video on YouTube. Infinite vanilla extract? Using a mother jar? Consider me intrigued. 

Simple enough concept - have a big jar with all your beans and alcohol, fill a smaller jar for daily use, top up the mother jar as you take from it. The mother jar sits and extracts until you need it. 

The only rules are, fill up your "daily use" jar when it gets down to 1/3 left. Never drain the mother jar more than halfway empty. Always add a couple beans to the mother jar when you refill with alcohol. 

So, I combined both of my vanilla extract batches (one Madagascar and one Mexican), plus the vanilla extract I got as a Christmas gift from a friend and the jar of vanilla I found in my baking supply crate. 

The jar I wanted to use had cucumber chips in it, so I took those out. It's just a little bigger than a standard quart mason jar. 

We don't love eating the cucumber chips as a snack. Might as well try something new. I pulverized them in my spice grinder to make cucumber ranch powder. Who knows how I'll use that, but we have it available! 😂 Man, I make some weird things sometimes. 

Here's the mother jar with everything in it.

The most frustrating thing was trying to get all of the residual vanilla beans out of the old jars, haha. Lots of pouring back and forth... 

Of course, pouring all that vanilla from bottle to bottle resulted in a bit of a spill. Instead of wasting the vanilla, I dumped some sugar on it to absorb the extract. I'll use the vanilla sugar and some type of baked good. 

I poured off two jars to use right now. Well, one is going in the fruit room to be my backup.