So I’d heard that most of the honey they sell in grocery stores isn’t “real” honey (I’ve always gotten the one that comes in the bear-shaped bottles), but I never really made it a point to seek out the “real thing” because I like the bear honey well enough.
But my mom sent me this bottle of Dutch Gold Organic Honey, and I gotta say this is really something (I’m not shilling for them, I swear). It’s very different from any honey I’ve ever tasted, and I’ve had Trader Joe’s “organic” honey as well - but it doesn’t taste anything like this. It’s richer, darker, and has a certain je ne sais pas which can only be described as giving the undeniable impression that you’re eating something which came out of a bee’s ass.
Actually I read up a little and I think what makes the difference is pollen. Apparently 3/4ths of honey sold in stores has some or all of the pollen filtered out. But this stuff doesn’t. And it’s pretty amazing.
Farm fresh Honey is a treat. I buy a gallon every year from a family friend in Louisiana. It’s a combination of wild flowers. Not the clover honey you get in grocery stores.
My favorite after dinner treat is a simple slice of toast with honey. Microwave 10 seconds and the hot, thin honey soaks right into the toast.
It’s also very good mixed with a tablespoon of peanutbutter and spread on toast.
Honey will get thick and turn to sugar. You need to bring a pan of water to a boil and turn off the burner. Put the plastic jug into the water. Let it sit 15 minutes or so until the water cools. Remove the plastic jug. Bring the water back up to boiling. Turn off burner. Immerse jug again. Repeat until the honey warms enough that the sugar dissolves. For a large jug, it may take a couple hours. Be patient.
Done correctly, you won’t melt the plastic jug and your honey will be good as new.
Now imagine that, only magically transformed into a drink. A drink with enough alcohol content to knock you on your ass and make you like it. That’s what I make out of wildflower honey.
I remember my granddad used to buy mason jars of farm fresh honey, with some of the honeycomb inside. I loved eating honeycomb, but haven’t had it in years.
Most honey sold in stores is clover honey. It’s mild, pleasant-tasting, and can be used as a sweetening agent in cooking because it doesn’t really affect the flavor of the food you are sweetening.
But there’s a LOT of honey out there! Orange blossom, buckwheat, even chestnut honey that is supposedly strongest-tasting honey available. Honey available from a farm will generally be from many different flowers, giving it a unique taste you won’t find in “store-bought” honey.
Unfiltered honey would give you a different taste, as well. Along with pollen, you’ll also get pieces of bees, plant matter, and probably some dirt.
Pollen could be of interest to you if you are concerned with naturopathic remedies. Some people treat arthritis with pollen and/or royal jelly. And an old allergy remedy is to eat the honey from the region that aggravates your allergies.
Honey also has antibiotic qualities. Honey can be kept on the shelf, unfiltered, unpasteurized, not canned or processed in any way, and it will not spoil.
~VOW
Yeah, there’s a lot of different types of honeys. Here’s a pretty good run-down. I’ve had acacia, clover, heather, linden, pine, and wildflower honeys, and they all have distinct tastes to them.
Nah. It’s true of lots of honey, but not the stuff at Trader Joe’s. (The same report that recently showed that most grocery store honey is highly filtered showed that all of Trader Joe’s honey had normal pollen levels.) Anyway, pollen doesn’t contribute much to the flavor of honey. It’s all about the varietal. Most honey in the US is labeled either clover or wildflower. Clover is perfectly good honey, but it’s relatively mild. I prefer honey with more flavor, especially darker honeys like buckwheat. Recently I got a small jar of blackberry honey that’s amazing. “Wildflower” can be anything; it just means the producer couldn’t (or didn’t want to) identify any plant as the primary source of pollen. Locally produced wildflower honey can be very good; the stuff in the stores is usually bland.
I once had a honey tasting with a friend of mine who’d been on vacation in Europe and collected different honeys. Thyme honey was very interesting. One of the best was “forrest honey,” which apparently is made from “honeydew,” i.e., the excretions of aphids, which the bees collect like nectar. So it’s insect poop that another insect licked up and then vomited and then I ate the vomit that used to be poop! Yum!
Do you make it dry? Dry mead can be exquisite, but it seems like everyone thinks honey must equal sweet, so they make disgustingly sweet crap. Do you think Beowulf drank that shit? Of course not! He was a viking! He drank dry mead!
Ah, you know I didn’t even notice but this bottle says “Wildflower” right on the package. Looking at their website, it looks like they offer tons of different varietals. Jeez, it almost reads like a fine wine menu (for buckwheat: “This is a robust, dark honey gathered from the nectar of the delicate, white flowers of the buckwheat grain” and orange blossom: “Orange Blossom Honey is a light, golden aromatic honey gathered from the blossoms of Florida’s orange groves, offering a hint of its citrus origins”).
I think I’ll have a lot of fun tasting them in the future now that I’ve discovered this previously-unknown-to-me world of pleasure.
The same place that sold the blackberry honey (in San Francisco, unfortunately) also had chestnut honey! It was very strong, but probably not as strong as tamarisk (salt cedar) honey, which I used to get at a Safeway in Colorado that stocked local produce. That stuff had a kick! A strong, sort of bitter flavor that I really liked. The chestnut was pretty good, but it was mostly interesting, so I decided on the blackberry. It actually tastes like blackberry to me! (They had “infused,” i.e., flavored, honey but this wasn’t one of those. All the flavor comes from the nectar.)
Regarding allergies, studies have shown no evidence that eating local honey has any effect. People do, rarely, have an allergic reaction to the pollen in honey, but by and large, ingesting it won’t set off your immune system enough to “inoculate” you. And anyway, hayfever allergies are caused by pollen from wind-pollenated plants. The pollen that bees collect is too heavy to be picked up in the air, which is why the plants evolved to attract insects! There’s probably some wind borne pollen in honey, but that’s just because honey is sticky, so anything floating in the air will end up in it once it’s collected.
ETA: Oh, I forgot to mention! I work in the pollination industry (though not with honeybees). Almond pollination in California is the largest bee-keeping pollination event in the world. I asked my friend Gordy why you never see almond honey. He said it tastes terrible! Way too bitter apparently. Chestnut honey definitely had a bitterness to it (different from the tamarisk honey I’d had), and I can imagine that if almond is stronger it might be unpalatable. Still, I made Gordy promise to get me a jar of it, so I’ll report back once I’ve tried it for myself.
I just looked at that website, Rigamarole, and I was surprised to see them advertising “USDA certified” organic honey. I was under the impression that there was no such thing as organic honey, despite some producers’ claims, because honey bees will travel for miles to gather nectar and it’s impossible to guarantee that all of the plants they might visit are free of pesticides, and therefore the USDA would not certify any honey as organic. Clicking on the page, however, I see that Dutch Gold claims this honey is from
Wow! I bet that is some unique-tasting honey! I’m a bit jealous now. I might have to order some of that for myself when I’m a little more flush.
To the OP, might I suggest looking for local honey, before ordering a ton of stuff from Pennsylvania? Check out your local farmer’s market, you’ll be surprised at the offerings and that there are beekeepers right in your area who are producing delicious honey. Local natural food stores also may get in on the act. There’s a place just down the street from me in Chicago that has a few hives of it’s own, and they bottle and sell the honey in their store. There’s also an apiary on the other side of the city where they use the hives and surrounding gardens to train disadvantaged youth and parolees. It’s a great cause to support, there may be something similar in your area. Amazing, the “lowly” honey bee - without it the planet would be dead!
Not that I don’t think you should explore what the rest of the nation or world has to offer - just make sure you’re covering local options. I buy the local stuff, but also have acacia-vanilla honey from Germany and lavender creamed honey from France (set me back a few pennies, that did, and worth every one).
If I were Columbo, this thread would be arrested for murder! (Just one more thing, sir . . . )
Proof that it’s not the pollen you taste:
When I saw that report about pollen being removed from honey (allegedly to make it untraceable so that it could be smuggled in from China) I asked Gordy (the PhD apiarist who promised to get me some almond honey) about it. He said that while there probably is some honey being smuggled from China, it’s not true that that is the only reason it would be filtered. Removing the pollen increases the shelf-life and decreases crystallization, so most supermarket suppliers insist on it. The report was also wrong that the only way to remove pollen is by dilution and ultrafiltration that basically turns the honey into purified sugar syrup (at which point it legally can’t be sold as honey). He said regular fine filtration will do the job, and that’s what the large suppliers want.
Quoi, monsieur?!