Should You Make Homemade Vanilla Extract? (2024)

I understand the appeal of homemade vanilla extract. What avid baker wouldn’t want a never-ending well of pure vanilla flavoring at their disposal? Some culinary personalities—like Ina Garten, Melissa Clark, and Zoë François—swear by homemade vanilla extract.

But working in professional kitchens, I learned that plenty of pastry pros prefer the store-bought stuff. Making your own vanilla extract can be expensive (depending on the method used, it’s not always cost effective) and some bakers just don’t think it compares to the high-quality extracts on the market.

To get to the bottom of this debate, I compared various methods and spoke to pastry chefs and recipe developers about the pros and cons of making and using homemade vanilla extract. I also made a few batches on my own and compared them against store-bought versions.

Before we get into the process of making your own vanilla extract, it’s important to understand the different varieties available. (Of course, there are plenty more vanilla products to consider, like vanilla bean paste, vanilla powder, and vanilla sugar. But for our purposes, we’ll stick to extract.)

Types of vanilla extract:

Pure vanilla extract, imitation vanilla, vanilla essence—these are a few of the labels you might see in the baking aisle. But what’s the difference between them? According to the FDA, vanilla extract must contain at least 35% alcohol; the vanilla component can come from vanilla beans or “concentrated vanilla flavoring,” among other sources. The source of the vanilla flavoring is the most latent difference in the types of vanilla you’ll find at the store.

Pure vanilla extract is made by soaking vanilla beans in alcohol to draw out their flavor compounds. Heilala vanilla has patented its three-month cold-extraction process, meant to “ensure that vanilla’s 200+ flavor compounds are purely extracted,” according to the brand. Since pure vanilla extract is made with real vanilla beans—in Heilala’s case, beans that are cultivated and hand-selected by Tongan growers—pure vanilla extract is typically pricier than the synthetic stuff.

How can you tell which vanilla extract is the good vanilla? Look to the label. The ingredient list on a high-quality, pure vanilla extract should be short and sweet: just alcohol, vanilla bean extractives, and water. Some extracts will also specify “single-fold” vs. “double-fold” vanilla—this refers to the concentration of the extract. Per the FDA, single-fold vanilla extract is made with one unit of vanilla per gallon of alcohol, whereas double-fold vanilla is made with double the amount of vanilla; as a result, it’s doubly strong—if using double-fold extract, you can use half the amount of vanilla called for in recipes.