Hambone's Mercantile

Cottage food regulations in Texas have been taking some beneficial turns. It’s been refreshing to see the acknowledgement that over-regulation can stifle growth. It’s also nice to know that organizations like Homemade Texas are also looking to preserve the human element integral to cottage foods.

As a cottage food producer, I am always thinking of how I maintain that human element in the topics that I write about and the items that I offer. As a biologist, I think it’s really important to develop a deeper understanding about how the world around us works. One of the ways that I try to do that is through offering items that lend themselves to building experiences. That may look like being introduced to the beautiful Texas Bluebell (not to be confused with Bluebonnets!), or allowing me to share the knowledge I have gained in working with that flower.

Today, I want to share a little bit of information on making extracts at home. Originally, when I approached homemade extracts, I started with vanilla. I was baffled how anyone could justify paying so much for one dried up vanilla bean at the grocer, much less THREE of them to make two cups of vanilla extract. I certainly couldn’t justify that price to experiment. I learned that buying vanilla beans in bulk gave me more control over the freshness of the product, the grade, and the price (per individual bean).

I also learned that the proof of the alcohol used matters, that mixing proofs results in cloudy (but still tasty) extract, and that by using different kinds of alcohol, my resulting extract would lend intriguing qualities to my end products. I also decided that whoever thought three vanilla beans per pint batch of extract was enough, was just wrong. In the end, I found that five beans per pint of “mother vanilla” made a superior product, and once the beans had given their all to the extract, they still made amazing vanilla sugar when simply placed into a jar of plain sugar (I have not tried this with anything other than traditional sugar). My mother vanilla has been going strong since 2010, and the longer I let it mature, the better the product gets.

Once mother vanilla is looking a little pale or seems a little less fragrant than normal, I pull out the most spent looking beans, add them to a jar of sugar, and replace them with fresh beans, right into my mother vanilla jar.

I still remember the frustration of navigating that exploration, so I made the kit and the information I would have wanted when I was starting out, and made it available for purchase through my Etsy store. It includes five vanilla beans, a pint jar with a spill resistant lid, and a two ounce amber glass bottle to decant cured, ready to use vanilla extract into (so you can top up your mother vanilla jar!).

I also created a lavender version, as I love lavender in teas, baked goods, and sometimes, even in my coffee. Lavender infuses much faster than vanilla, so I learned to test it every few days until it reached my desired strength (around a month for my taste). After that, I decant the extract off the flower buds and store in an amber glass jar. I do not yet know how many rounds of extracting lavender flowers can go through, but the better quality the flower buds, the more complex and tasty the extract. It’s always fun to see how things end up working, and I hope you give it a try too!