This year we have an excess of honey and saved a bucket of it apart to "cream" for ourselves. The process takes a couple of weeks for us to do, but it is such a great way to keep one's honey. Here is a short description of the process: To begin with, we made a liter yoghurt bucket full of our honey seeded with some fine cream honey. We would use this to seed the large bucket of our extra honey with. When we are potting-up the honey in jars the last bit at the bottom of the tapping buckets always has some amount of bubbly "scum" at the bottom of the buckets. We save this for ourselves. Also after letting the freshly slung honey "ripen", the top of the honey is always covered with bubbles that float to the top. We remove this with cling wrap and then press it into the saving bucket (scum bucket) for creaming later on. The process began about a week-and-a-half ago. Our yoghurt bucket full of seed-honey was poured into the scum bucket full of extra honey. You can see the light seed honey mixed with the dark-looking pure honey. This was mixed for about twenty minutes and then we placed it into the fridge temporarily, on it's own shelf. : The honey was taken out of the fridge and stirred for ten minutes each evening and left out on the counter overnight. The following morning, it was stirred thoroughly again...then it went back into the fridge until bed time....then the process was repeated. Half way through the process, it began to seriously thicken and change colour. This morning the process had come to an end. It was ready.: We will simply leave the honey in this bucket and scoop some out to fill jam jars from time to time as it is necessary. My bride finds my term, "scum bucket" unfair.... With a straight face, I suggested, "honey bucket"? That bump on my head ought to be all healed-up in a couple of weeks, I reckon.
Oh I can think of so many ways that I could make use of all that honey. Somehow I don't think it would last long here.
Very interesting Sjoerd,..i can almost imagine the taste,..creamy,..yes Honey Bucket sounds better,..safer as well lol.
ISLAND--I am glad that you think the process looks interesting. It is to me, of course...but when others find id interesting as well, I am well chuffed. Thanks STRATS--It takes time to do, but the result is soooooo rewarding. Heh, heh, heh--I hear that, EILEEN. Cheers PHILIP--The honey is so easy to deal with in this form. The terms were really bouncing around that day.
It looks sooo good! Well worth the work and time it takes for sure. Having no bees I have to buy mine but, luckily there is a family just out of town that makes creamed (or whipped) honey that we buy. It is expensive but, after your detail of the work involved, it's well worth it.
Thanks 2OF. How good that you can get some honey right down the road. Yeah, that process is a bit work intensive, but soooooooo worth it in the end.
Never knew creamed honey is a way of processing honey until about 5 years ago when I was in New Zealand. I had consumed lots of manuka honey in this form and thought they existed naturally in cream form . The sales girl in the honey store in Wellington explained the process to me. Creamed honey is delicious with bread ...yum!
Thanks Eva---it really is. KK--It is simple to make and it keeps well in that way. I eat it very day.
We use regular honey in every thing all our baking and pickling and some fruit preserves etc. If a recipe calls for a cup of sugar we use half a cup of honey and it works well.
That sounds like a great use of honey. The flavour really does add something special to some dishes doesn't it.I would suggest that you keep bees yourself, but I can see from your postings that extra time is not something that you have a lot of.