What about vanilla bean infused honey?
We take a plump Grade A vanilla bean, cut it into half or thirds, to fit the jar, fill with locally produced honey. We then turn the jar upside down, then right side up, repeatedly for a week before we leave it alone to incorporate the vanilla flavor into the honey. We do this same process with pure maple syrup infused with vanilla beans.
And vanilla bean sugar.
We take our vanilla beans, spread sugar in a baking sheet pan, place the vanilla beans around the pan, add more sugar, let them rest for a few days. If we’re adding orange rind at the same time, it’s added with vanilla beans. When we can smell the vanilla (and orange) in the sugar, we then remove the vanilla beans and the orange rind (no pith on the rind) , and we process these until they are powder. We then mix them into the sugar, and mix them well, then package the sugar with vanilla bean powder (and orange rind powder), together. Sometimes we’ve included spices in our sugar combination. So, what do you do with this sugar? You can flavor your coffee or tea, add to oatmeal cereal, bake with it, sprinkle sugar mixture over your batter bread, muffins, cookies for added flavor. It can be used in any way you use regular sugar or plain honey. Same with the salt infused with vanilla. It’s processed the same way.
Then we have our specialty of vanilla bean powder.
I have to tell a story here; a lesson learned the hard way. After my vanilla was done, I removed the vanilla beans, and I allowed them to dry in a pan overnight. At this point, I put the pan into an oven at 170 degrees F., to further dry the beans. I had just stepped away from being in front of the oven door, when I heard a huge bang! I saw my oven door come open, and a large ball of fire came out of my oven. It was a flash fire; it was out just as fast (thank you Lord). But the lesson I learned is there is still enough alcohol in the processed beans, that it caught fire, even with a low temp oven and having air dried for a couple days. So, now I only use fresh vanilla beans, I slice them and prepare them as I would for making extract. But then I dehydrate them in the oven. I still use grade A beans as I want all the flavor I can get (oils and caviar). After they have dried to a “snap” dry state, I process them. I then sift the batch and process the pieces. I repeat this process until the result is a fine powder of vanilla beans. If you have a recipe that is delicate to the balance of dry & liquid, such as macarons, using the vanilla bean powder is better than using vanilla extract.
Vanilla Bean Paste
Is cooked in a large pot on the stove top. This recipe takes a couple hours. The paste is a bit sticky, and full of caviar. You can use it measure for measure as you would in a recipe calling for vanilla. This is a beautiful way to have the seeds mixed in with your ice cream, vanilla cake or vanilla frosting, or pudding, to mention just a few applications.
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