 |
| |
 Time to give up the sticky generics and go for the greats: raw, varietal honeys (a.k.a. gourmet honey) from the internationally renowned beekeepers of Savannah Bee Company. Even this piece of challah knows it is more glorious with “the real deal.” |
| WHAT IT IS: Rare, raw honey from Georgia and other Southeastern states. |
| WHY IT’S DIFFERENT: These are varietal honeys that are difficult or impossible to find elsewhere, produced by dedicated beekeepers who move their hives to the most remote areas to follow the nectar. |
| WHY WE LOVE IT: Purity of honey flavor, and the pronouncement of varietal flavor in each particular honey. If you eat honey regularly, these honeys will make you pause. They’re like discovering new favorite wines: even if you like what you were currently drinking, you know you have found something better. |
| PURCHASE AT: Find retailers at SavannahBee.com. |
|
|
|
Savannah Bee Company Honeys: “To Bee” Is No Longer A Question
CAPSULE REPORT: There’s honey, honey and honey. The first is the generic, pasteurized, blended stuff of supermarkets, called “pure” honey, “blossom” honey or “multifloral” honey (all honey comes from blossoms, a.k.a. flowers). The second is varietal honey that names a specific source—clover, orange blossoms, white sage, wildflowers et al. As with any other product, there are different levels of quality; hopefully this honey will show at least one dimension of the varietal’s character. The third is rare, varietal honey, carefully tended by artisan beekeepers and delivered to you as raw honey—not heated or treated but with multiple layers of flavor. Call it “gourmet honey,” just call it over and spoon some out of the jar. As soon as you taste it, you know how different it is. Just as not all cabernet sauvignon rootstock is created equal, the nectar from some orange blossoms produces far superior orange blossom honey; and beekeepers, like winemakers, have different levels of skill in handling the bees and extracting the honey.
When Savannah Bee Company’s Ted Dennard decided to become a full-time beekeeper, the world became a sweeter place. His rare varietal (or monofloral) honeys are sought by aficionados the world over. Once you taste the distinct flavors of his black sage, tupelo, orange blossom, sourwood and raspberry honeys, you will never buzz around lesser honey again.
|
Sweet Reading
 |
 |
 |
| Honey: A Connoisseur's Guide With Recipes, by Gene Opton. Learn in detail how honey is produced, and the wide number of varieties of honey. Eighty recipes for using honey emphasize cookies, cakes and similar desserts, but vegetable and meat dishes are also included. Click here for more information or to purchase. |
Honey: From Flower to Table, by Stephanie Rosenbaum. Learn about the process that turns flower nectar into honey, plus the history and symbolism of honey. Cooking and crafting chapters include recipes for honey delicacies and simple crafts like honeycomb candles and lip balms. Click here for more information or to purchase. |
Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey—The Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World, by Holley Bishop. Part biography of a professional beekeeper, part history, of bees and honeymaking, this book is a celebration and a love letter to bees and their sweet product. Click here for more information or to purchase. |
“To Bee” Is No Longer A Question: Savannah Bee Company
Honeys
When you dab an exquisite artisanal honey on a buttered English muffin, say thanks to the ancient honey bees, diligent team players who have been working together in hives for 30 million years, and to the modern artisan beekeepers who continue to ply their craft despite the temptations of less backbreaking and hazardous work. There are many different kinds of honey—300 varietals made in the U.S. alone. Real lavender honey, blueberry honey or raspberry honey is made from the nectar of the blossoms of those plants.* Honey takes on the flavor of the blossom, not of the fruit, by the way. Sometimes the two flavors are similar, sometimes not. Blueberry honey doesn’t taste like a spoonful of blueberries, but tastes generally fruity with a hint of blueberry on the finish. Buckwheat honey, on the other hand, is unmistakably buckwheat, as if someone had richly infused the honey (but it’s natural).
*There are products on the market called lavender honey, raspberry honey et al that are simply generic honey infused with flavor—read labels carefully.
The Savannah Bee Company is a specialist in the rare honeys of Georgia and the southeastern U.S., including black sage, orange blossom, saw palmetto, sourwood and tupelo. Ted Dennard and his team are beekeepers extraordinaire, bringing the honey to market in its pure and natural state—raw honey, as opposed to that which has been pasteurized for mass marketing, to prevent crystallization on the shelf.
When you look at a jar of honey, you may visualize bees buzzing in hives, and think of all the insect effort it takes to make the product (in fact, the bees will fly a cumulative distance of more than 55,000 miles—more than the distance to the moon and back—to make one gallon, or 12 pounds, of honey). But think of the human effort to move the hives to remote sites to connect bees to blossoms.
The Savannah Bee Company staff goes to great efforts to move their bees from location to location to find the rare blossoms that create the best honeys. They literally follow the blooms, chasing the opening spring flowers and their nectar flow, carting their colonies hundreds of miles to find the exact meadows and riverbanks where the bees can get to work to create great honey. Some plants blossom for many weeks, some for just a few. Combine a rare plant with an ephemeral blossom, and you have just two weeks a year for your bees to gather the nectar from which they make precious amounts of that honey.
|
The Langstroth bee hive, shown above, is the standard used in many parts of the world for beekeeping. In 1853, the Rev. L. L. Langstroth, published a book with his observation that bees will not bring the surfaces of two combs closer together than a “bee space,” which is about a quarter of an inch. Prior to his discovery of the bee space, bees were hived in skeps (conical straw baskets) or “gums,” hollowed-out logs that approximated the natural dwellings of bees. Langstroth constructed his hives so that the frames in which the bees were to make their combs were mechanically separated from all adjacent parts of the hive—the walls, the floor, the cover and other frames—by a quarter of an inch.
|
The beekeepers begin in April in the deep swamps of Georgia, setting their colonies on the banks of the Ochlockonee River to gather nectar for tupelo honey—the blossoms are open for only two or three weeks. In May, the bees are brought to the coastal forests for the flowering palmetto trees. In June, the hives are hauled up into the North Georgia Mountains to make sourwood honey. The sourwood trees had not blossomed in Georgia since we first tasted the sourwood honey in 2003. Had we only known, we would have enjoyed ours more sparingly. The black sage trees finally bloomed last spring after a few years’ hiatus, and last fall we snatched up several jars. This past spring, the sourwood trees cooperated: there will be sourwood honey this fall!
What Makes A Good Varietal Honey
Let’s take a moment to describe artisan beekeepers, and what they do to make great honey. When you commit to purchasing a better quality of honey, it will be a varietal or monofloral honey—both words refer to the same thing, a honey made from the nectar of just one variety of flower. So what’s the difference between a monofloral honey from Savannah Bee Company (or other fine artisan producer) and another bottle of varietal honey you’d find in a fine food store or gift shop?
- A Boutique Operation. Small-batch artisanal honey—a beekeeper with hundreds of hives—is carefully watched in the way that a larger operation with thousands of hives cannot be. When focusing on monofloral honey, the artisan beekeeper has the time to give the hives more individualized attention, beginning with placing them exactly—so there are no ground cover flowers, e.g., to attract the bees as well as the orange blossoms on the trees. After the honey is made, it is very carefully extracted, handled gently and bottled. Processing the honey from thousands of hives cannot be done with an artisan’s watchful eye; the artisan oversees subtleties like the pressure the honey is subjected to during pumping and pressure bottling. Artisans strive to keep the honey as close to its original state as possible.
- What’s In The Bottle. There is no industry regulation of varietal honey contents. Back to the wine analogy, a varietal bottle must contain 80% of that grape. When you buy a cabernet sauvignon, you expect the wine to taste like a cabernet. When you buy a monofloral honey, there is no such guarantee—the contents could contain as little as 50% of the varietal (bee pollens are measured to validate the type of honey in the jar). Perhaps a beekeeper blended the honey to achieve a certain flavor or color; or perhaps the bees strayed beyond the particular varietal field and brought back nectar from other sources. Weather, e.g. rain, also can make a difference in why a honey doesn’t have much varietal characteristic. A beekeeper with a top reputation won’t label honey as a varietal that doesn’t have 90% or more of the varietal pollen: he or she will sell it as blended honey instead. It isn’t that the honey isn’t good—it’s that it won’t give you the true varietal experience the beekeeper thinks you should have.
Oh, Honey
What’s it like when you taste your first spoonful of great artisanal honey? You’ll know when you taste these (and Savannah Bee Company sells a sampler, so you can taste all four currently available honeys):
- Black Sage Honey. The most rare of the honeys available at the moment, it relies on the flowering of the black sage trees. When we purchased a bottle last fall, the trees had not flowered for four years. This honey has a body that is utterly different from any other American honey; and distinct flavor notes of apple, berry and vanilla. It has a faint echo of tilleul, the famous and very costly French linden tree honey. Black sage honey never crystallizes, due to its high fructose to glucose ratio—which also means that it can be enjoyed more by diabetics.
Special Uses: While all of the honeys can be used for any purpose you like, black sage honey is a perfect companion for black tea. It enhances the tea without covering up the tea flavors.
- Orange Blossom Honey. Many people who have had orange blossom honey have not had the “orange grove” experience. A fine orange blossom honey will take you there, and Savannah Bee’s is an explosion of citrus on the palate, followed by hints of toffee and almonds.
Special Uses: Orange blossom honey is a favorite for toast, muffins and scones. We especially like this flavor drizzled on sweet potatoes.
|
Black sage honey, shown above in the tower jar,
doesn’t crystallize; but any honey that has
crystallized can be heated in the microwave for 30
seconds, or in a pan of hot water for 10 to 15
minutes.
|
Cremed raspberry honey shown in the hexagonal
jar.
|
- Raspberry Honey. From wild raspberry bushes and made in cremed form, this honey tastes and smells like raspberry pie. One could eat it straight from the jar as a confection. Raspberry honey is sold in cremed form because of the high glucose content of the varietal: it crystallizes almost as soon as it is removed from the comb, so it can’t be sold in liquid form.
Special Uses: A dazzling spread for toast, biscuits and scones—something to make brunch extra-special.
- Sourwood Honey. There has been no sourwood honey for a few years,† so mark your calendar for September when it returns—demand always exceeds supply. The gingerbread flavor is ethereal: a sweet, spicy, anise aroma with hints of maple and a warm finish. Had we known we were not to have it again for a while, we would not have been so generous, encouraging all of our friends to “taste this!” Like black sage honey, sourwood honey does not crystallize.
Special Uses: We used it as an ice cream topping and spread it on pound cake and gingerbread. The flavors match with Asian foods and green teas, both hot and iced.
†Sourwood is an understory tree that often doesn’t get enough sunlight to produce nectar for the honey. The last three years have been extremely difficult; cloudy, cool weather in the spring have produced blossoms, but not enough nectar. There was about 30% of an average yield last year in North Carolina, and other states, including Georgia, had none at all.
|
- Tupelo Honey. Savannah Bee Company considers their tupelo honey the “gold standard” of honey. It is produced from the flower of the tupelo gum tree, also known as the water tupelo, which grows in the rivers and swamps surrounding Savannah. The trees flower for just three weeks a year, in April. This light amber-colored honey has unique flavor notes of melon, crème brulée, butter and dried pear, with a very subtle herbaceous undertone of southern moss. With this kind of complexity, it is becoming one of the most popular table honeys for connoisseurs. Tupelo honey also does not crystallize. It is the only honey to be immortalized in music and film: in a 1971 song and album of the same name by Van Morrison; and the 1997 film Ulee’s Gold, starring Peter Fonda as a beekeeper whose “gold” is his tupelo honey.
Special Uses:
This is the all-purpose honey in the line of great honeys—for tea, toast or dribbled over a piece of aged cheddar.
|
 Tupelo honey shown in the tall flute.
|
 Honeycomb. |
Honeycomb. Some people enjoy their honey from the comb, and Savannah Bee Company obliges with a beautiful 4-inch-square honeycomb of rare Georgia honey, beautifully packaged. The honey is typically from white holly or saw palmetto blossoms. The wax is edible (it’s the adult version of the chewy wax liquid-filled candies of childhood).
Special Uses: The comb makes a beautiful presentation on a brunch table or cheese board.
What else can you do with your fine honeys? The answer is below.
|
Back to Index
Honey Serving Tips
There are so many great honeys out there that pursuing great honey becomes as much of a culinary sport as tracking down the best olive oils, vinegars or other wonderful ingredients. Honey is a condiment as well. So the flavors an interesting set of honeys brings to your table are exponential...and from a palate point of view, explosive. While Savannah Bee Company offers a few varietals, other artisan beekeepers all over the United States pursue their own local blossoms, creating wonderful products. The National Honey Board’s Honey Locator service can link you up to beekeepers who sell particular varietals. Then, use them:
 At breakfast, not just on toast, scones and muffins but on cold and hot cereal, pancakes and waffles - With dairy: a mix-in to yogurt, a drizzle over cheese, on ice cream and in ice cream (look for honey ice cream recipes online)
- As a bread-dipper: challah and honey are one of the food world’s great pairings, and a sweet bread (e.g. raisin), semolina or nut bread cut into chunks or strips makes a tasty snack or a lighter dessert with coffee
- To sweeten vinaigrettes, soups, stocks, salsas, barbecue sauces
- With fruit salad, pears or apples (apples dipped in honey is a traditional Jewish New Year’s treat—but so good it should be enjoyed by everyone, regularly)
Photo at right by Melody Lan
- As a garnish, on melon and prosciutto
- To glaze chicken, duck, salmon, shrimp, pork loin, carrots, sweet potatoes
- With cheese (see below)
When serving or cooking with honey, remember to match your varietal to your dish.
- Lighter-flavor honeys (acacia, blackberry, clover and orange blossom, e.g.) are more general-purpose and can be used for baking, sweetening, desserts and candy.
- Medium-intensity honeys (blueberry, eucalyptus, lavender, sage, sourwood, thyme and tupelo, e.g.) with a pronounced varietal character will show through in seasoning. Use them in ice cream, marinades, sauces and salad dressings.
- Stronger honeys (avocado, basswood, chestnut, buckwheat and leatherwood, e.g.) should be used for savory dishes or baked goods with a stronger flavor. Marinades and sauces for red meats, stronger varieties of cheese, breads, richer muffins and cookies with darker flours and brown sugar cry out to be paired with these honeys. Pairing honeys with cheeses is an art unto itself: some people insist on chestnut honeys with blues and parmesan; wildflower is often recommended with blues; buckwheat and Manchego are a match; and tupelo with cheddar, previously noted, is a hit with many.
Back to Index
Honey Storage
Honey is amazingly durable: because of the high sugar and low moisture contents, it doesn’t spoil. Edible honey has been found in the tombs of the Pharaohs! But that doesn’t mean you should treat your fine honey cavalierly.
- Keep jars capped tightly when not in use. Cute honey pot jars with open necks for dippers are not for the storage of rare honeys.
- Store honey in a cool, dry place, preferably out of the light.
- Don’t refrigerate honey, it will crystallize (except for the high-fructose varieties that don’t crystallize, like tupelo and black sage). Even at room temperature, most honeys will crystallize over time. To restore honey to liquid form, microwave it for 30 seconds, or put the jar in a pan of hot water for 10 to 15 minutes.
The Final Buzz On Honey
There’s a lot of honey out there. If you use supermarket honey, it’s tantamount to using supermarket tea bags, a generic product without nuance or character. Even in specialty stores, when faced with a large number of choices, choosing honey is like choosing any other specialty food: you’ve got to know the brand you’re reaching for.
As we hope we’ve shown, the best honey comes from the best blossoms, which are a challenge to find; and then have to be handled by dedicated artisans who know how to extract it gently from the comb. The honeys of Savannah Bee Company have won the loyalty of honey-lovers across the U.S., as well as customers in Europe and Asia. Will you be next?
—Karen Hochman
FORWARD THIS NIBBLE to anyone who loves honey, or has never liked it and needs an eye-opening experience as to what great honey tastes like.
SAVANNAH BEE COMPANY
Rare Raw Honeys: Black Sage, Orange Blossom, Raspberry, Sourwood, Tupelo
Certified Kosher by KSA
- Different sizes available based
on variety of honey. See website.
|
|
Above, Sampler Pack gives a taste of the top honeys.
Waffle with fruit and tupelo honey. Photo by Melody Lan.
|
To find a store near you, visit SavannahBee.com
Prices and flavor availability are verified at publication but are subject to change.
Back to Index
Read about some of our other
favorite sweet treats in these
sections of THE NIBBLE online
magazine, and check out these
articles about honey:
|
|
Back to Index
FOR MORE PRODUCT REVIEWS, special offers,
contests, opinion surveys, THE NIBBLE
back issues archive, product gift-finder, links to our favorite
food websites and more,
visit the home page of TheNibble.com.
Do you have friends who would enjoy THE NIBBLE?
Click here to send them an invitation to sign up for their own copy. |
ABOUT THE NIBBLE. THE NIBBLE™, Great Finds For Foodies™, is an online magazine about specialty foods and the gourmet life. It is the only consumer publication and website that focuses on reviewing the best specialty foods and beverages, in every category. The magazine also covers tabletop items, gourmet housewares, and other areas of interest to people who love fine food.
© Copyright 2004-2008 Lifestyle Direct, Inc. All rights
reserved. All information contained herein is subject to change at any time
without notice. All details must be directly confirmed with manufacturers, service
establishments and other third parties. The material in this newsletter may not
be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with
the prior written permission of Lifestyle Direct, Inc.
|
|
|
|
