I went to use a jar of honey last week. It was purchased a couple of months ago, from a local beekeeper who sells at the farmers’ market.
When I tried to squeeze out some of it though, it wasn’t flowing. I stuck a spoon in the jar and gouged out a couple of globs - the stuff is the consistency of, say, very stiff dough, or half-frozen peanut butter, or something. Slightly grainy, which suggested “crystallized” to me but I just always assumed that honey was more obviously solidified when that happened.
I went ahead and added the blobs to the dish I was making, and we all ate it and none of us have died… yet…
It just got too cold. Heat it up by standing the jar in a pot of water (water level about halfway up the jar), then putting the pot on top of your floor heater or in front of your wall heater or on the stove at very very low heat. In a few hours it will melt and be fine.
No, it just crystallized. It’s fine; you can reheat it and melt it back to a more liquid state by placing it in a pot of hot water on the stove for 20 minutes.
Have you ever made fudge? More to the point, have you ever made BAD fudge? When you have a supersaturated solution, there are just as many sugar molecules in the water as it’s possible to get in there. When you add just one more (say, if the spoon you’re stirring the fudge with has a bit of sugar on it and it falls in), the sugar molecules all glom together in a disastrous conga line and make crystals. In fudge, this leads to grainy nasty fudge.
In honey, when some of the water evaporates *out *(and it will, even if the top is closed, but it will do it faster if your kid uses the honey and doesn’t close it all the way), your supersaturated solution suddenly has one too many sugar molecules to stay dispersed in the water. Like the bad fudge, the sugars begin to crystal conga.
Moving the water molecules a bit further apart (say, by heating them) gives the sugar more room again, and allows it to temporarily break up the crystals. They’ll recrystallize as soon as it cools again, though.
Obviously you don’t have this problem often, but for those who can’t get through a container, you can create your own “spun” honey to prevent it.
Basically, you force it to crystallize with really tiny crystals, which produces a softer, spreadable texture. You heat the honey to melt all existing crystals, and then seed it to get the crystals you want. Once that’s done, it can’t recrystallize without melting first.
There are recipes online.
ETA: IME, honey doesn’t recrystallize immediately upon cooling, but it usually goes much faster once it has crystallized the first time. Probably not getting it hot enough to melt all the existing crystals thoroughly.
Slightly off topic, but I have a crystallized honey story.
Many, MANY, moons ago I used to work for a health food manufacturing company. They had honey in 55 gallon drums that they used in their products, and the honey would regularly crystallize in them. We had “barrel heaters” to solve this issue: imagine a collar with heating elements in it about 8" wide that circled the barrel. Whenever we’d come across a crystallized barrel, we slap the barrel heater on it for a few hours and that would melt the honey.
Normally, we’d heat the barrel in the upright position. The top of the barrel contained the access hole into which we screwed a spout. The access hole was about 6" in diameter. To use the barrel, we’d put it on the barrel dolly. The dolly would hold the barrel on its side, about 2 feet off the ground – just the right height for our purposes.
For whatever reason, we got into the habit of mounting the barrel on the barrel dolly (on its side) first, THEN unscrewing the access plug and screwing in the spout. Honey flows so slowly, as long as you’re agile, you can remove the access hole cover and screw in the spout without spilling any honey. Normally, we’d use 2 guys: 1 would unscrew the access hole cover until it was just ready to come out, and the other guy would have the spout ready to push in the hole and screw it in. So guy 1 would would say “ready?”, guy 2 would say yes, guy 1 would pull away the cover and guy 2 would screw in the spout. Easy peasy.
So we had a barrel crystallized that we had just used the barrel heater on. We mounted the barrel on the barrel dolly. I was guy 2. guy 1 unscrewed the hole cover and said “ready?”. I said yes. guy 1 pulled the access hole cover off – and a 6" diameter stream of honey came SHOOTING out of the access hole, covering my leg, pants, and shoes. So, ummmmm, I guess honey is lot less viscous when it’s hot.
Oh yeah, hot honey is definitely pretty liquid. I spent a summer working for a beekeeper, bottling honey right out of the heater. It ain’t your molasses-slow honey at that temp.
Well, now… you say “nasty”, but it’s only really nasty if you’re thinking of it as failed fudge. I’ve always found that if a batch of fudge turns out grainy, it’s better to think of it as an experiment in making tablet.
