Honey!

My city has been offering some local co-op produce, and they were looking for tasters for the products. I volunteered, and this morning I tasted the honey. Here is my review of it.

This morning I got yet another reminder of just how little I know about food sometimes. Before this, I thought that honey was honey. Bees make honey. We eat honey. I didn't realize that there was a difference. I would just buy whatever was cheaper, though I would try to get locally produced honey if possible.

Turns out, they can process honey quite a bit, and it has a rather dramatic effect on it. Most of the

honey we buy in the grocery store is pasteurized and filtered. It makes for a nice, clear product, but the enzymes, antibacterial properties and other parts of the honey can change.

Today we sampled three different honeys. 1- BeeMaid Canadian Clover Honey (henceforth known as "clover"), 2- Miller's Pure Honey from Utah (generic) and 3- The farmer's honey (farmer's), also produced in Utah.

The first big difference we saw was appearance. All three were filtered, and the first two were pasteurized. The farmer's honey was significantly darker in color, and wasn't quite so clear.

We were given bread and butter to help us with the sample, but I mainly tasted each by itself to get a better taste. The next big difference was the consistency. The grocery store honeys were quite a bit runnier. I put a blob of each of the three on the plate, and then held the plate upright for a few seconds to show the difference in runniness.

Then came my favorite part- TASTING! I'll admit that I didn't taste a huge difference between the clover honey and the generic Utah honey. The utah honey was slightly better, but not a big difference. There was, however, an enormous difference in the farmer honey. It wasn't nearly as sweet. Now, I realize this may seem like a bad thing, but it really wasn't. It was still definitely sweet, but it had a more complex flavor, if that makes any sense. You didn't have that teeth hurting all consuming sweetness with the farmer's honey that you got with the canadian clover honey.

The best part is that it looks like the farmer's honey will end up being cheaper per pound than either grocery store honey, and by a fairly significant margin. Now, you'll have to buy more of it than what comes in a little honey bear, but good news- Honey is about the only food on the planet that never, ever goes bad.

If you are interested in buying, here is a link to the order form. You have to scroll past the citrus and beef order forms to get to honey. They are charging $13.75/tub (5 lb tub), and that works out to be about $2.75 a pound, which is a great price!