[Sca-cooks] honey

[Terry Decker]

Honey is honey based on chemical structure.  Heating introduces some 
chemical changes.  One needs to keep in mind that honey is a complex organic 
product with varying percentages of various sugars and organic and amino 
acids (some aromatic, some not), which produce a complex, varying taste.

Honey is graded on soluble solids, flavor, aroma, clarity and lack of 
observable defects.  The taste and aroma are based primarily on the pollen 
sources and avoiding detracting flavors from caramelization, smoke, 
chemicals, fermentation, etc.  Honey quality is not defined by chemical 
structure.

According to the USDA, honey must contain pollen, which permits tracking the 
honey to the pollen source.  Based on testing, much of the honey in the U.S. 
is mislabeled as to source.  Thus, your orange blossom honey, may not be 
orange blossom honey, no matter how great the quality.  Ultra filtered 
commercial honey often has the pollen filtered out, which means that 
technically, it isn't honey.  The ultra filtering process is one of 
hydration, heating, forced filtration and dehydration, which appears to 
cause more change at the molecular level than simple filtration and 
pasteurization.

You can boil over ultra filtered honey and you can turn it to hard crack on 
the stove top and burners.

Aside from skimming off impurities, heated honey blends more easily with 
other ingredients in a recipe.

Bear


=======
Galefridus commented:
<<< Inexpensive
grocery store honey is OK for initial practice, but the higher quality
honey behaves differently and results in a more delicate flavor. >>>

Ok, I can believe that the generic grocery story honey has a different
flavor, but what do you mean it behaves differently?

I think that common grocery store honey is honey that comes from bees
feeding on unknown plants or at a variety of plants that the beekeepers
couldn?t really track. Usually clover honey here in Texas.
======

Ah, okay. I had read that as Galefridus saying that the structure of the 
honey varied because it cam from say orange-blossom honey, rather than the 
common grocery store clover honey. I was assuming that that was what he 
meant by higher-quality honey, rather than that the higher quality honey had 
undergone less processing. I couldn’t see how the honey from different 
pollen sources would actually change the structure, rather than the taste, 
which it definitely can.

Some of those honeys I mentioned had wildly different tastes. If you could 
afford it, using a variety of different honeys in different Sekanjabins, 
could give you a lot of variety in taste, even if the rest of the 
ingredients were kept the same.

We have discussed, and debated how pasteurization may affect things like 
milk and honey previously, but this is a much more detailed discussion than 
before, at least on honey.

I’ve heard that you don’t need to boil and scim modern honey because it has 
been filtered, that what the medieval recipes were doing is removing any wax 
and odd bits of stuff like dead bees and parts of bees. If this is the case, 
then it also avoids the over boiling that some have mentioned.

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
   Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          StefanliRous at gmail.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marksharris
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****







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