One of the very best inexpensive gifts that will impress even the biggest foodies is homemade vanilla extract. It's a gift that's meaningful, useful, and oh so delicious — and the process to make it ...

Pure, homemade extracts are easy to make and add better flavor to your cooking and baking. These simple instructions can be used to make any extract flavor using quality ingredients—no fillers, ...

Vanilla extract is so easy, so cost-effective and so satisfying, you might decide you’ll never again shell out your hard-earned money for the pre-made stuff in a tiny vial. Instead, make extract in ...

It was during a recent class on holiday cooking that the subject of vanilla extract came up. One of the items I made was a trendy salted caramel sauce flavored with homemade vanilla. Well, there was ...

Vanilla suffers typecasting as ordinary. In software, it’s vanilla versus custom. In finance, it’s vanilla versus exotic. But vanilla hardly counts as plain. Consider her bio: Vanilla comes from ...

Claire is Lifehacker's Senior Food Editor. She has a B.S. in chemistry, a decade of food journalism experience, and a deep love for mayonnaise and MSG. Plunking a scraped and spent vanilla bean into ...