What to use instead of vanilla extract
It depends entirely on what it's doing in the dish. Here's the job, what else does it, and what to skip.
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Background aroma that rounds off a sweet dish
Vanillin plus a few hundred trace compounds fill the gap between sugar and fat, which is why butter, cream and chocolate taste fuller with it and thin without it.
Vanilla bean pasteRan out
1:1
Stronger and speckled with seeds, and there is less alcohol to flash off, so it holds up better in anything uncooked.
A vanilla pod, split and scrapedRan out
1 pod per 1 tbsp extract
Deeper and more floral, and it needs steeping in something warm for 20 minutes to give it up. Nothing to evaporate.
Alcohol-free vanilla flavouring, glycerine basedNo alcohol
1:1
Slightly sweeter and less penetrating, and it does not carry through a long bake as well. Add it at the end.
Bourbon or dark rumRan out
1:1
Carries a similar warm note in anything baked, and the alcohol cooks off. In an uncooked frosting it just tastes of booze.
Almond extractRan out
1/4 tsp per 1 tsp vanilla
Loud and unmistakably almond, so it stops being a background note and becomes the flavour of the dish.
What doesn't work: Vanilla-flavoured coffee syrup. It is mostly sugar, so a teaspoon does nothing at all and the quarter cup you would need to taste it wrecks the sweetness balance.
Vanilla in something uncooked, such as buttercream, ice cream base or panna cotta
Nothing evaporates, so both the vanilla and whatever it was dissolved in stay in the finished dish and every flaw shows.
Vanilla bean pasteRan out
1:1
Rounder and more aromatic with visible seeds, and no alcohol edge on the finish.
A pod steeped in warm cream or milkRan out
1 pod per 2 cups liquid, steeped 30 minutes, then strained
The fullest flavour available and it takes half an hour of waiting. Reuse the pod in sugar.
What doesn't work: Imitation vanilla in anything raw. Synthetic vanillin is the single note without the couple of hundred trace compounds around it, and with nothing to hide behind it reads as cheap and faintly chemical. In a baked cake nobody can tell the difference.