Lucidity GC-FID Helps With Baking!

Awhile back, Lucidity did an extraction of vanilla using the pressurized liquid extraction, and this got me thinking about doing the extraction at home in a cupboard for use in my baked goods.  The first thing I did was what any good home baker does, I went online to see how to make homemade vanilla extract. I found out that all I needed was some cheap vodka, vanilla beans, a jar, and six months.

The directions that I found said to place the vanilla bean into the vodka and wait for the extraction to happen. Being the good chemist that I am, I know that increasing the surface area will speed the extraction along.  So, I then split the beans lengthwise and then cut the beans into approximately 3 pieces, so in the end I had 30 total pieces of vanilla bean.  These beans were then placed into approximately 300 mL of cheap vodka. 

Six months is a long time to wait for some vanilla to use in baking. I wondered if the six month timeline was to be absolutely sure the extraction was done and would the vanilla extract be done sooner. So, I designed a sampling schedule to find out.

First, I took a sample of the vodka to act as a blank baseline, then I took a sample at one week of extraction, and finally I took samples in approximately monthly intervals out to six months. When all of the samples were taken, I also found samples of a store brand vanilla extract and an expensive artisan vanilla extract. Finally, a vanillin standard was used for identification of peak.

Each of the samples was run neat to eliminate any chance of an error in dilution using the method below:

Once the standard was run through the GC-FID and the retention time of the vanilla locked into the software, the samples were then set up to run on the GC-FID with an ethanol blank between each sample to prevent any carryover.

The first thing I wanted to see was the difference between the store brand and expensive artisan vanilla.

Chromatogram of the Expensive Artisan Vanilla Extract

Chromatogram of the Store Brand Vanilla Extract

To no surprise, the expensive artisan brand contained more vanilla than the store brand. 

Overlay of the Two Purchased Vanilla Extracts

Up next was to look at the homemade vanilla extracts. I was not expecting the results that I saw. After only 1 week the extraction was nearly 85% complete and the total extraction was done after only 4 months. I based this on the peak area no longer increasing in the chromatogram.

Overlay of the Vanilla Extracts

Not only was the extraction done 2 months earlier than the 6 months, but the one week extraction had 15% more vanilla than the expensive artisan vanilla extract.

Overlay of the 1 Week Extraction vs. Expensive Vanilla

From here I have a few options. I could use the vanilla in its more concentrated form and get a stronger vanilla flavor. I could use it as is but less than called for in a recipe. Or, I could use the cheap vodka and dilute the extraction to the concentration of expensive artisan vanilla extract. I can say that I have never had a recipe go bad because I added more vanilla than was called for by the directions, so I am going to use the extract as is, in the amount called for in the recipes I choose. This way I am adding a bit more than is called for, without having to add extra.

The overall point of this experiment wasn’t to show that homemade vanilla extracts are better than store bought, we all knew they were, but to show that the Lucidity GC-FID is an excellent instrument to monitor your extractions and that the overlay feature of the software can give a quick visual indication that the extraction is complete.

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