Caramelized Korean Beef with Kimchi Fried Rice by GloryBee

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food, honey, honey recipe, Korean Beef, oriental recipe, recipe

Buckwheat Honey is our central ingredient for this recipe. While some may question our choice of honey on this recipe, we picked it because Buckwheat Honey is known for its depth of flavor. You can use Buckwheat Honey for all sorts of savory recipes and we think this is a great fit! Enjoy!

Read the full recipe here:  Caramelized Korean Beef with Kimchi Fried Rice — GloryBee

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What’s the Price of Cheap Honey? by Married with Bees

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adulterated honey, food, honey, honey prices

People love to ask questions when they find out that we started keeping bees.  One of the most common questions is, “When will you start selling honey?”  That question is usually followed by the comment, “Local honey is really expensive.  You can make a lot of money.”  In our part of the Midwest, local honey sells for anywhere between $8 and $12 for a 1 pound bottle, and those prices are typically set by hobby beekeepers who sell mostly at places like farmers markets.  If you read my previous blog post, you will know that hobby beekeepers aren’t getting rich on their honey.  The question that people should be asking is, “Why is the grocery store honey so cheap?”  The answer to that question will probably shock you.

Read the full article here: What’s the Price of Cheap Honey? — Married with Bees

Honey Pickles by The Ephemeral Bee

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honey, honey pickles, honey recipe, pickles, recipe

I found a recipe for Honey Bread and Butter Pickles in Canning for a New Generation and decided to give it a try.  I’m reluctant to continue to call these pickles bread and butter pickles since they’re missing one of the key components I generally associate with bread and butter pickles – the sweetness factor.  I actually doubled the amount of honey called for in the recipe.  They were still not what I would consider sweet, and I tend to have a fairly low tolerance for sweet.  The recipe still turned out a wonderful pickle, it’s slightly different from a traditional dill, and has the additional bonus of not containing any cane sugar.  I also didn’t bother with canning these pickles, although, this recipe is perfect for canning if you want to put in the extra work.  I simply decided to save some time and store then in the refrigerator for up to a month, and gift a few jars.

via Honey Pickles — The Ephemeral Bee

Ginger Honey Pear Butter by Fillmore Container

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ginger, honey, honey recipe, pears, raw honey, recipe

Ginger Honey Pear Butter

September is National Honey Month and it seemed fitting for us to celebrate. Not only because we have a pretty sweet line of honey jars, but also because we’ve been enjoying honey sweetened preserves and all the benefits of swapping honey for sugar in our jams, fruit butters and other preserves.

If you haven’t tried using honey in place of sugar in your preserves, this post about honey sweetened preserves offers some guidance on how to do that safely. We’ve also learned a lot about the addition of honey, and tried many trusted recipes from the books Naturally Sweet Food in Jars, and Preserving with Pomona’s Pectin.

GINGER HONEY PEAR BUTTER

This recipe is adapted from Marisa McClellan’s recipe for Gingery Fig Butter in her book Naturally Sweet Food in Jars.

Yield: 5 (half-pint/250 ml) jars

3 pounds/1.4 kg pears, chopped

1 cup/340 g honey

1/4 cup/60 ml bottled lemon juice

1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger

Prepare jars, lids and a boiling water bath canner and 5 half-pint/250 ml jars.

Note: You don’t need to peel these pears. The natural pectin in the skins helps thickening. And adds flavor and nutrition. When you puree the pears (with the skins), you’ll find the skins just disappear into the butter.

Combine the pears, honey, lemon juice, and ginger in a low, wide, non-reactive pot. Place over high heat and bring to a boil. Once the contents of the pot begin to bubble and roll, reduce the heat to medium-low. Using an immersion blender, puree the warm pears until smooth. Cook, stirring regularly until the pear puree is thick. You know it’s done because it begins to thickly coat the sides of the pan and offers more resistance when you stir. During cooking, the pear butter may have clumped up a bit. If this is the case, use your immersion blender to puree is smooth again.

Remove the pot from the heat and funnel the finished butter into the prepared jars, leaving 1/2 inch/12 mm of headspace. Wipe the rims, apply the lids and rings, and process in a boiling water bath canner for 15 minutes.

Ref.:

https://www.fillmorecontainer.com/blog/2018/09/20/ginger-honey-pear-butter/

Use Honey first for a cough, new guidelines say by Lytchett Bay Apiaries

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honey, honey for cough, raw honey

New guidelines for doctors from the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) say they should tell patients to use honey first when they have a cough. This is based on 3 studies that showed honey reduces symptoms by 2 points on a 7 point scale.

Honey and over-the-counter medicines should be the first line of treatment for most people with coughs, new guidelines recommend.

Read full article here: Use Honey first for a cough, new guidelines say — Lytchett Bay Apiaries

Corn Fritters with Honey-Bacon Drizzle by christinanifong

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beekeeping, honey, honey recipe, raw honey, recipe

This summer, I became immersed in the world of honey. It began with my reporting on a magazine story about backyard beekeepers, which then led to lessons in how honey is made and why it’s been a treasured food for millennia. Did you know there are more than 300 documented varieties of honey in the US alone? Or that the University of California, Davis developed a tasting wheel to categorize the hundreds of flavors that can be detected in these many hues of honey? All this research, of course, ended up with me back in my kitchen, testing recipe after recipe. I write today to share this, my favorite new honey recipe. Think of these fritters as tasty, hearty hush puppies, good enough to make into a meal. The honey flavor is subtle, yet a perfect complement to the corn and pork.

Read entire article with recipe here: Corn Fritters with Honey-Bacon Drizzle —

Is this RAW Honey?

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beekeeping, food, honey

Excellent write up on the topic of raw honey. Many, if not most, of my customers ask for specifically “raw honey” for the health benefits. They often have many requirements such as non-filtered, non-heated, and local sourced. This article by The Apiarist explores the topic of raw honey.

Source: ‘Raw’ honey — The Apiarist

How many times have your been asked that?

Define ‘raw’

Chambers 21^st Century Dictionary defines ‘raw’ as meaning: 1. said of meat, vegetables, etc: not cooked. 2. not processed, purified or refined. … and then wanders off into definitions of ‘raw’ silk, weather and wounds, though no mention of raw honey.  Clearly honey is both a foodstuff and ‘not cooked’, though if it’s heated excessively it has to be sold as ‘Bakers honey’.

However, is it processed, purified or refined? I operate my extractor with the gate open. I run the honey through a coarse filter (~2 mm) directly into 30 lb. buckets. This removes the worst of the lumps that really shouldn’t be in honey … big pellets of pollen, scraps of brace comb and bits of bees. I really don’t want any of these on my toast in the mornings, and I don’t want them floating on the – inevitable – scum when the jar is opened as I would really like to attract repeat customers. I store the 30 lb. buckets until I’m ready to jar the honey, re-filtering it through a fine mesh and removing the scum before bottling. The end product looks great and has a good shelf life.

Since ‘purified’ means to remove contaminants I suspect the pedantic would consider the honey is no longer raw.

Raw honey on labels

Honey labelled for sale must carry one of the following reserved words that describe the product … Honey, Blossom Honey, Nectar Honey, Honeydew Honey, Comb Honey, Chunk Honey, Cut Comb in Honey, Drained Honey, Extracted Honey, Pressed Honey, Filtered Honey and Baker’s Honey. If the predominant nectar source is known the reserved word can be prefixed with the source e.g. heather honey.

It’s notable that raw, organic, unfiltered or unheated aren’t reserved words and yet are regularly found on honey labels, sometimes immediately preceding the word ‘honey’.

The taste test

The jar at the top of the page is coarse filtered ‘raw’ honey run straight from the extractor into the bottle. It’s slightly cloudy and has bubbles and a sort of swirly, almost birefringent, appearance when you hold it against the light. It will almost certainly crystallise unevenly and unpredictably. It might have an antenna lurking in its murky depths.

It tastes absolutely delicious.

But then so is honey that’s been allowed to settle in the buckets, gently warmed in a honey warming cabinet^†, filtered through a fine mesh filter, allowed to settle again, skimmed (to remove the bubbles that rise to the surface) and then carefully bottled in pre-warmed jars. This is still ‘raw’ – as in uncooked – honey but it’s also certainly a more refined product. It’s beautifully clear, it looks great on the shop shelves or the breakfast table, it sells well and it attracts a premium price. Like all pure honey that hasn’t been heated to very high temperatures or filtered excessively it will eventually crystallise, but it has a long shelf life and will remain attractive for the duration.

It might be interesting to conduct a blind taste test of a jar of ‘raw’ honey with one refined just enough – as described above – to look really good and sell well. It might also be interesting to auction an unlabelled jar of each and see which is more attractive to the customer … or see whether customers who find bee legs in the jar make repeat orders

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^† Going by the number of visitors who come to this site having searched for a ‘honey warming cabinet‘ I suspect that the ‘raw’ honey sold by most beekeepers is at least partially refined. As an aside that last link also takes you to details of the cabinet sold by Abelo’s, which looks lovely (a lot more aesthetically pleasing than my DIY effort), but costs an eye-watering £599 and doesn’t enable you to pre-warm supers before extraction. A missed opportunity.

 

Read more at:  ‘Raw’ honey — The Apiarist