Honey Tasting

Women, Food, and Culture.

It's my writing class, and it's awesome. The professor's great, she's been teaching it for several years and has her history down pat. When was fire first discovered?

Oh, around 800,000 years ago.
#casual.

An optional field trip last week was up to the Yale Farm, where we sat around a long, wooden communal table and sniffed and tasted artisan honeys with pairings straight from the farm.

It was amazing! We tried 5 different kinds of honey, ranging from light to dark.

My favorites were the pumpkin blossom honey and the goldenrod honey. The former was dark, spicy, reminiscent of fall and molasses cookies. We had it with brie which was a deliciously rich pairing. The latter was agressively sweet in aroma and lightly perfumed with the scent of flowers to taste.
It smelled super sweet.
It tasted perfum-y.

My senses are all askew.

The goldenrod honey also reminded me a bit of chamomile, the way it's got a golden flavor.
Sight, too, now? Really, this is just getting confusing.

Every single one of my senses loved the goldenrod honey, in a different way.
On opposite day.

We had it with carrots, which I felt was kind of a weird pairing. The carrots were delicious, and the honey, but given they were both raw, neither had melded with the other so it was disorienting to eat together. Maybe that's why my senses were out of whack.

The pairings (from 12 o'clock and clockwise): goat cheese and mint, green beans, brie, carrots, and beets.

The other honeys we tasted were a blueberry blossom honey (with goat cheese and mint--my favorite pairing of the day--it was a classic, fruity, sweet honey), a linden honey (earthy and light), and a buckwheat honey (bitter, musky, dark--it polarized the group into haters and...not haters. I'm in the first group).

The beekeeper who spoke to us, Marina Marchese, runs Red Bee Apiary. Her honey was great!

She was full of facts about honey's properties, one of the most interesting of which was that honey contains an acid which reacts with some chemical our digestive tracts produce and makes hydrogen peroxide, so that would be one reason honey is often used on wounds and can be an antibacterial. It also has such a high concentration of sugar that bacteria literally cannot stay alive in it, so no need to refrigerate!

From left: propolis (a kind of resin), beeswax, and pollen (which is apparently great for your health and has a super strong but nice taste)

Love you, honey!

You're so sweet. Thanks for reading, y'all.