By Katrina Curran and Lisa Sheffer
Vanilla beans are the world's second most expensive spice, and even if you get them from Indri's Vanilla Bean Group orders, they're likely to be one of the most expensive food items you'll ever purchase. The good news is, the entire vanilla bean pod is edible (though we don't recommend just chomping down on them), and can be used in many different ways. Here's some of our favorite ideas:
Make a second, smaller batch of vanilla extract. We've found that vanilla beans have about 1.5 good batches of vanilla extract in them, so you can usually make a second batch with less alcohol and it will turn out good.
Remove the caviar from the vanilla bean and add to recipes.
Dehydrate the vanilla beans and make vanilla sugar.
Vanilla sugar is simply vanilla beans + sugar, and can be used wherever you'd use granulated sugar, to enhance everything it graces. Click the photo below to learn more.
Dehydrate the vanilla beans and grind them to powder.
Vanilla powder is easy to make--though it can be a challenge to get the powder fine enough without a high-powered blender or spice grinder--and is very versatile. We like to add vanilla powder to get concentrated flavor without added liquid, especially in baked goods.
(Don't forget to make a smoothie or coffee creamer or something delicious in that blender after making vanilla powder!)
We have several wonderful vanilla paste recipes that work great with once-extracted vanilla beans. Click the photo below to learn more!
