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Honey as it should be
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The Taste of Honey
How anyone can get honey to retain its proper flavour.
Picture Gallery
Some pictures of my apiaries
Contact details
email address; plus links to useful beekeeping/ weather sites.
My beekeeping husbandry methods which work for me the UK Midlands.
This is being added to as and when I get the time...
Product Information
The flowers visited by my bees
A typical honey factory.
Website last updated :
14th September 2009
|
My enlightenment
came thanks to one of the founder's of the original
Cranks
Health food shop in London's West End. It was explained to me
exactly what was wanted, i.e. unheated honey, and without putting it
through a fine filter which (a) normally requires the honey to be
heated
to get it to run and (b) removes the pollen which other beekeepers,
criticising my methods, have ignorantly described as "dirt". This was in the 1970s when
I became one of their regular, albeit very small, suppliers. |
Honey is one of the few foods on sale which can be obtained in a pure form: i.e. nothing added and nothing taken away. Also, properly harvested, it can be a very rare foodstuff indeed: one which has not been processed. Bees make honey and their "production" happens without human intervention. What man does can only degrade a perfect product. In particular heating the honey - an unavoidable procedure for commercial honey producers/ packers - kills the enzymes present in the natural product, as well as affecting various flavouring compounds. This gets very technical, for example here is a typical quote from a web advertisement for a learned journal article:
"Twenty-six flavour compounds were statistically closely related to the floral origin of the honeys (P ≤ 0.05). The flavour index was evaluated progressively in heated honeys, whereas in fresh honeys it showed a minimal value."
It is reasonable to conclude from this extract that the research chemists found that heating honey spoils it, and in particular the more it was heated the more it was spoiled.
It should also be borne in mind that filtering honey to get all the small particles out of it is very difficult - if not impossible - without the use of heat to both liquefy any honey crystals that are starting to form after harvesting and also to speed up the process: hot honey runs like water. Room temperature honey obstinately clogs the filtering medium.
Comb honey is the easiest route to that perfection: the comb is simply removed from the hive and put in a (usually) plastic container. The 'capped' wax honey cells seal the flavour in. However comb honey is expensive in the sense that the bees use a lot of resources making the wax 'packaging' which they would otherwise recycle.
What is wanted is a way of retaining as much of the quality of the comb honey when it is simply put into the standard glass jar.
For the answer see... here....
