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If you have been to Dean & Deluca or Whole Foods lately, you have probably seen various jars of honey priced at $20 or more. While you could easily purchase a jar of the same size at your regular supermarket for just $5, below are three reasons why you should make the pricier investment:1. Preserve nature's candy! Honey is a natural product produced by bees pollinating flower pollen. Industrial honey is created by an unnatural process in which bees are fed sugar syrup. This is actually bad for the bees.
2. The taste difference between an industrial jar of honey and an artisanal honey is tremendous. At the moment, my favorite honey is produced from bees pollinating heather plants that grow on the hillsides of the Landes region in France. It has an intense floral aroma with lingering notes of caramel.
3. The diversity in flavors of artisanal honeys means that there are many more uses for them. All industrial honey tastes the same. Artisanal honey varies depending on what the bees are pollinating. For example, while a chestnut honey is bitter and has an earthy aroma; acacia flower honey is sweet and has a floral aroma. Whereas chestnut honey is typically spread over a thin layer of sweet butter on toast, acacia flower is added to tea or other hot beverages.
You can distinguish your artisanal honey from your industrial honey simply by its appearance. Poorly made honey will be transparent and will not thicken. An indication of high quality honey is the fluffy thin white foam that is often at the top of the jar or the crystallization.
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6-05-2008 @12:18PM Tyguy said... I enjoy the honey that I get at my local farmer's markets. However, I rarely really notice much difference as there's lots of good honey in the grocery stores. Perhaps my perspective is just a bit lax due to having been in China a few times. There, the industrial honey has lovely notes of a tin can and really is nearly inedible. The only good tasting honey I had there was stuff I bought from a farmer in a coastal farming community a few hours south of Shanghai. I had to talk my Chinese friends into trying it as they only had experienced the industrial stuff and they all thought honey was really horrible. They were really surprised to taste normal honey.
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6-05-2008 @1:20PM fasteddie said... I've heard that ingesting local honey helps with allergies. So as local as possible is best.
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6-05-2008 @1:29PM Veronica said... Now, granted, I'm in one of those secluded stinking-tree-hugging-liberal-hippie parts of the country, but I can get amazing honey (lavender!) harvested 20 or 30 miles from my house for about 6 bucks at my local farmer's market. Is that not the case in regular civilization?
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6-05-2008 @1:50PM Sarah said... No, Veronica, I live in civilization and the same is true here. Plus, it's local, instead of being shipped in from France, which can't be good for the environment, either. And it's eight bucks.
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6-05-2008 @2:39PM Marisa McClellan said... I have a friend who has two bee hives in her backyard (right in the close-in suburbs of Philadelphia). Just last weekend several of us went over to her house and helped harvest three frames of honey. It yielded 15 cups of honey and was some of the most delicious honey I've ever tasted. Here's to good quality honey (wherever it may come from).
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6-06-2008 @10:47AM Mary said... I purchase local honey too....here in WNY it's fairly plentiful at farm stands & markets, and I've never paid more than $5.00 for a decent size jar.
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6-07-2008 @12:02PM Big John said... *snerk* $200 for honey? I'll put it next to my $600 bottle of wine and my humidor full of expensive cigars.
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6-08-2008 @9:55PM meghan said... I purchased my first box of honeycomb at the farmers yesterday. I just tried some of it, and the beeswax is a bit unsettling, however the sweetness and the floral aroma was amazing.
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