5 replies to this topic

[EllenC]

My daughter is working as a nanny in Bonn and can't seem to find vanilla extract in the stores. I hesitate to ship alcohol via mail (especially internationally), so I am wondering if she is missing it or there is some trick to finding it?

Please help, she's whining...

Thanks!

Ellen

[Lisa Shock]

If you don't have success in finding some, she can make her own if she has access to alcohol. Here's a thread on making it yourself:

http://forums.egulle...act-experiment/

There are still great grade B beans available very cheaply on eBay. You could ship those to her. I personally now start with grain alcohol (very high proof) then add whiskey later as the infusion starts to be fragrant.

[EllenC]

Thanks for the reply. She knows how to make it, because we use homemade here all the time. But she doesn't want to wait months for it to develop flavor.

I was hoping there was just some local difference in shopping she wasn't picking up on...

Ellen

[Mjx]

There are two possibilities here: The first is that alcohol-based extracts are not sold in what you would consider 'the usual sorts of shops', and may instead be found in one of the last shops you might be likely to look for them (e.g. pharmacies); health food shops sometimes have ingredients that aren't found elsewhere. The other possibility is that in Germany, vanilla is not [widely] available in liquid extract form.
I've never looked for vanilla extract in Germany, but in Denmark (where I spend a lot of time), vanilla is most commonly available as the ground bean (powder), as a paste, and as vanilla sugar (and the whole beans, too); recently, I've seen a single brand of vanilla extract in a some branches of one supermarket chain, but it still isn't commonly found.

For whatever it's worth, the Dr. Oetker site (one of the major German baking-ingredient producers, also very widely distributed in other EU countries) lists several forms of vanilla: http://www.oetker.de...ackzutaten.html. My German is nearly non-existent, so I couldn't determine for a certainty that any of the products listed were alcohol extracts (but I think not).

[anzu]

Vanilla extract is very rarely sold in Germany. People usually use vanilla sugar instead.
Pretty any supermarket will have it, even the cheap places. She should be looking in the baking section, near the baking powder and such like. It's sold in small paper envelopes (as is baking powder) in packs of three or 10, and will be labelled either Vanillinzucker or Vanillazucker. Each sachet has 8 grams, and is meant to be enough to flavor 500 grams of flour.

[EllenC]

Thank you so much! I will let her know.

Ellen