I’ve just taken the first crop of honey off my bee hive. It’s not a massive amount by beekeeping standards- somewhere around 15lb- but that is quite a lot of honey for one person to use. I’m going to give some away to friends and family, but I don’t really like that many people, so I’ll still wind up with quite a bit at the end.
So… what should I do with it? I don’t eat meat, which cuts a few options out. I’m going to try mead, and honey cake, but what else?
It’s very light, with a mild flavour, mostly from lime flowers, I think.
Just what I came in to say. Pepper Mill has made several batches of mead, and it’s surprising how much honey is needed (and how much it costs). and here you have just such a large amount of it.
You could turn it into candy, honey sugar, honey-roasted nuts, honey spread, and so on, but that only uses so much of your stock.
And it’s not just mead. There are plenty of variations – metheglin, melomel, pyment, cyser, and so on.
The issue is jar size- I only have 8 oz jars… Giving a friend a jar of honey seems nice, giving them several jars seems odd, somehow. Plus then it gets complicated, because I don’t have enough jars to give everyone two, so I’d have to work out some kind of like/honey formula and maybe fall out with a few of them to make it all add up.
I also only have one demijohn spare for mead- the others are still full of last year’s blackberry wine and cider. I’m moving house in a week, so it’ll have to wait until I get to my new place anyway.
Hmm. I just checked, and we buy honey in 44 oz jars–our family likes honey :). A batch of honey-wheat bread takes about 1/3 lb in the baking, and tons more in the eating (nothing beats a slice of homemade whole wheat toast slathered in butter and honey). We probably go through 3-6 jars of honey like this a year. Multiple 8 oz jars wouldn’t be weird at all to us.
I use at least a quart a year. I love to spread it on hot toast. Honey is a great topping on vanilla ice cream. I always sweeten Cream of Wheat hot cereal with honey.
You can cook with it. Replacing white sugar with honey.
Somewhere or other I have a recipe for gingerbread (really more like a ginger cake), which is sweetened with honey rather than sugar. It’s really good stuff, all soft and muffin-like and full of ginger and cinnamon and nutmeg.
Now I have to hunt up the recipe. I haven’t had it in years.
You could dehydrate it and then grind it into powder… it’s easy to do but it has to be stored immediately or it starts soaking up moisture from the air. Looking around the web some people use starch to help with that (powdered honey) and companies use various fructose mixes (or freeze drying) to make their powders stay dry. The powders are then used as sprinkles on desserts, in dry rub spice mixes or in cold or hot tea. How to Dehydrate Honey | LEAFtv
It might be easier to just buy more jars to keep your extra honey in (or bigger jars). When we give away jars of salsa to friends and family they usually end up sending the empty jars back with “more, please and thank you”. We bought a case of cute pint jars for the give away vs the usual pint and quart jars for our own usage.
Not legally. I know what the rules are round here, and it’s not worth the trouble to meet 'em for the amount I have to sell. I could probably sell a couple of jars to people I vaguely know, who won’t care about labelling restrictions and the like, but public sales are a definite no.
Thanks for the recipe ideas- I did do a quick search, but all the recipes I seemed to find had mostly sugar, with just a few spoons of honey for extra flavour. I’m currently out of sugar…
Hot honey and lemon. Just boiling water, as much honey as you like for sweetness, and a squeeze of lemon to balance some of the sweetness. I can go through a lot of honey this way.
