Homemade Extracts

I was making some homemade breakfast sausage and I decided to add some maple flavoring, which really topped off the flavor nicely. This got me curious as to whether it was easy to make flavorings and extracts or not. I did some research online and saw that it was really simple, it's just that some of them take a long time to 'brew'.

The first extract that I wanted to make was vanilla extract. The hardest and most expensive part of this is buying the beans. Wow! Forget gold, I think I am going to invest in vanilla beans instead. At best you can find them for about $1 per bean online. Locally I was finding them for $2-$3 per bean. I wanted to get a batch going so I sucked it up and bought 12 of them.

I made a slit down each bean the entire length of the bean. Then I put them in a quart jar about 3/4 filled with vodka. You can use rum also, I don't know that it makes much of a difference though (??) I don't drink any more, so this was the funny part of it all; sneaking into a liquor store hoping no one would see me! Ha! Then I put the jar into a place in my house that is away from extremes of heat and cold, and out of the sun. I shake it maybe once every day or two, but make sure you shake it at least once every week.

The recipes I saw online called for an aging period of anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months, and every one I saw had a different ratio of beans to vodka. I think that 3 months will suffice, and right now am at the 2-month mark. It's getting darker and getting a stronger vanilla aroma to it. If the darned beans weren't so expensive I would add a lot more beans to it, but again they aren't cheap. I have read that once you make a batch of vanilla extract, you can cover the same beans with vodka and make it again. I will see if this is true or not after I finish aging this batch.

Some of the extracts that don't take nearly as long and that I've completed now are lemon extract, orange extract and maple flavoring.
For orange and lemon extracts use one orange for every half-cup of vodka. You can slice the rind off, being careful not to cut any of the white pith, then finely chop it by hand or in a food processor. Or, as I did, rub the orange over a fine grater like this one that I have:



Then add the grated rind to the vodka/rum. After a week, filter the extract through a coffee filter or a piece of muslin and it's done. When my vanilla extract is done, this is all that I will have to do to it also.

I found this idea online about making maple flavoring and it is also easy. It's not a true extract, it is a flavoring, and to get the maple flavor you don't use a maple product at all. It surprisingly comes from something called fenugreek seed, which I got through Amazon.com, about $4 for 7 ounces of it.

For every 4 ounces of vodka, you will use 2 ounces of fenugreek. First warm the fenugreek seeds slightly in a skillet, but don't toast them as you would when toasting nuts. The fenugreek will become bitter if you heat it too much. You just want to warm them to release the flavor.

Next grind the fenugreek in a coffee grinder, food processor or something similar, into a fine powder. Pour the ground fenugreek and vodka into a glass jar, I used a quart canning jar. Store it out of direct sunlight for anywhere from a few weeks to 3 months. I found that it had a good smell to it after 6 weeks. Next strain the contents of the jar through a coffee filter or a piece of muslin.

I tried making almond extract but after a couple months it did not have much of a nut smell to it. I might try it again, but age it at least 3 months and see how that goes.

The bottles that I put the extracts in were hard to find without spending a lot of money, But finally I found these 1 oz. amber bottles for only .59 cents a piece at my favorite store of all time, Lehman's Hardware in Kidron Ohio.



However, I was not able to locate them on their website, and bought some on a recent visit there. Other places that carry some small bottles that would work are Joanne's Fabric, Hobby Lobby, and World Market had a few.

So I am just waiting on the vanilla extract, it should take another month. I have already given some of the orange and lemon extracts away to friends. One of them baked with the orange extract and gave it a big thumbs-up.

Spring 2010 Garden Update

As you can see above, I cut my first salad this past Wednesday, May 5th. I use May 1st as a target date; last year it was about April 28th, the year before it was about May 5th. As I have stated before, I like to harvest my first salad at about the same time most people are thinking of breaking ground and buying seed. I'm fairly competitive, even with my gardening. I think they should come out with a full-contact gardening Olympic event.

Here I am cutting my first spinach, lettuce and pulling a green onion for salad



The two rows of green in the pic are two different plantings of spinach. I grew a lot of it and hope to blanch/freeze some of it.

You can't see it in the pic but in the back row is garlic, in between the two green rows are a couple rows of onions. I'm going to plant more onions from sets because I end up eating so many pulled early for green onions for salads.

My taters are popping through the ground too. Yukon Gold was the variety I planted this year. I've had pretty good success with that variety, and can't wait for my first 'new taters.'

Every year I try something new, and this year it is kale and collards. They popped through the surface just in the past couple of days. I just discovered collard greens this year, and really like them. I cook them with a piece of bacon added to the pot, then add vinegar to them when I am ready to eat them. That's how I learned to like spinach when I was a kid, the vinegar really made it good.

I also have Bibb and a Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce that are ready to be cut. You have to plant lettuce and spinach early, they don't do well after things heat up outside. I usually plant these early veggies about mid-March here in central Ohio.

Sugar Snap peas are an edible-pod pea variety and I planted two 10-foot rows of those, each row on other sides of a trellis. I trellis them with a couple of 2x2 posts with wire strung between the posts. What I don't eat fresh I blanch and freeze, then vacuum pack.

I have grown herbs for a number of years now, but increased my planting this year. Usually they are limited to my small herb gardens, but planted a couple of 10 foot rows of basil, and a row each of cilantro and parsley right in my veggie garden. I think I might be able to sell some of them at a local farm market(?) Even if I can't sell them, fresh herbs are a great gift and I will give a lot away to friends and neighbors.

Purple basil is something I discovered last year. It can be used as any other basil, but I infused vinegar with it and it looks beautiful. The vinegar turns a beautiful purple/pinkish color and has the basil taste also. So I am growing it again, but this year I am growing a row that is about 6 feet long.

Most of my perennial herbs are doing well again this year; sage, oregano, lemon thyme and lime thyme, chives (and some garlic chives.) I planted tarragon last year, for making tarragon vinegar, and didn't realize until this spring that it is a perennial also. It came up with a fury and my tarragon plants are already a couple of feet tall!

Tarragon:



I planted a LOT of sweet basil this year. I like to use it fresh in cooking, but a good way to use it is to make pesto. I make large batches of it then put it in ice cube trays and freeze it. Then I put the cubes in freezer bags. I can already taste it spread on a piece of homemade Italian bread, or a dollop of it in a pasta dish.

Here is one of my two little herb gardens as it looked the other day. I will plant a few more things in the spaces that are open. The 2 potted plants are my babies, my bay trees. You can't beat fresh bay leaves for cooking and you won't go back to store-bought, dried out bay leaves once you have tried the fresh ones.



The fall is when you are supposed to plant garlic, and I usually do plant it then. However, it just didn't work out this past fall, and I planted the garlic early this spring. If you plant in spring, the bulbs are much smaller compared to autumn-planted garlic. I had some HUGE garlic bulbs the past couple of years, and I am kicking myself for not planting it last fall. Oh well, there's always next year...

Just for kicks and giggles, I planted a line of Mammoth Sunflowers in the back row of the garden. That should look pretty nice, and they produce quite a few seeds for eating, roasting, etc

The temperature is supposed to go down to an overnight low in the high 30's this weekend, so I am going to wait to plant the maters and peppers. I can, however, plant broccoli and cabbage any time now, they tolerate cool temperatures very well.

My grapes (Concord and Catawba) are growing well too, and showing small flowers/bunches already. I need to spray them with Mancozeb soon, this will help prevent what I think is called black rot. The grapes will form normally, then almost overnight a black spot appears on the end of the grape and the whole grape dies, and dies quickly. One day you notice a spot on the grapes and in a couple of days your grapes are gone. It broke my heart when that happened a couple years in a row until I discovered Mancozeb.

I think I am losing my favorite tree, my sour cherry. Last year the leaves formed then a large number of the leaves just wilted, and I didn't get any cherries from the tree. This year it appears that the same thing is happening. I need to get a picture to the extension office or some other experts for their opinion of what is happening.

So the garden is progressing. I'm eating out of the garden already, but still have things to plant as soon as I can, and when the weather permits. Things are getting pretty exciting for this gardener!

Infused oils and vinegars

Necessity was the mother of invention for this project. Not that I invented this but it was somewhat new to me.

I grew quite a bit of purple basil for the first time this year and needed to find a use for it. The thought of purple pesto was somewhat strange so I started surfing the internet for ideas. I saw a picture of some beautiful purple-basil-infused vinegar and I had to try it.

I mixed cider vinegar and white vinegar at a 50/50 rate, which has a beautiful color even before infusing. In a half gallon of the mixed vinegar I added about 2 cups of purple basil leaves.


I let this set on the counter for a week, then filtered out the basil leaves and anything else that might have come off of the leaves.


Muslin was a good choice for a filtering material. I also use it in cheese making instead of traditional 'cheesecloth', which is almost worthless when actually trying to use it for cheese making. I could have left the leaves in the vinegar but I know from experience that the leaves start to fade and wilt quite a bit and do not look very good.

I also infused another batch with garlic. I smashed about 6 cloves with the flat side of a knife and let those sit in the vinegar with the basil for a week. It smells wonderful after a week, with the basil and garlic smell. It will probably be very good in many Italian dishes.

Nasturtiums are an edible flower that I grow, I haven't used them in any dishes yet but need to do it. I have read some nice ideas for cooking with them. A simple salad topped with a few nasturtium flowers would be a very nice presentation. I tried to keep some of the fresh flowers in a bottle of vinegar but the acidity of the vinegar wilts and fades them too much. However, in that failed attempt I found that the flowers color the vinegar with a beautiful color:

The bottle on the right is 50/50 cider/white vinegar right after adding the nasturtiums. The one on the left is a few days after adding the nasturtiums. Also in both of the bottles are stalks of garlic chives.

I also have started a couple batches of basil and garlic infused extra-virgin olive oil.


These leaves are green basil and not the purple basil (the purple might make an interesting looking oil though!) From what I have read I will have to let this sit for a month or longer to properly infuse the oil. Before adding the basil leaves it helps to smash the leaves quite a bit to help release the flavor of the basil. I also added about 4-5 smashed garlic cloves to this. I plan on filtering all of this out when it is completed. If I am going to use this to actually cook with, I am going to research whether this will require heating after the infusion is complete. I think that even if I don't find any information about it, I might heat it to a little over 212 degrees (boiling point of water, and a low heat for oil) for about 10 minutes, just to kill any of the 'nasties' that might be in there. I can't see that it will hurt it, and can only help.

Another herb that I grew again this year was tarragon. Simply cut the tarragon to the right length and slip into the jars of vinegar. It's very simple and look great.


The hardest part of this project is finding nice looking bottles to use. The ones pictured here with the spouts I found at Walmart for about $4 each. I have seen some very nice ones on sites online, but they can be pricey. If I decide to get any of those, I would probably make them into Christmas presents.

There are a lot of other ideas that you can find online, search with the term 'infused vinegar recipes' or 'infused garlic recipes' or something similar. Or simply use your imagination and think of what would look good or taste good with vinegar and/or oil.