Flavored honey - Amazing Food Blog

Honey is a wonderful food. Firstly, and most important, it tastes fabulous! Rich, sweet and with a note of fairytale and childhood dreams. Next, it is definitely beneficial for your health. With micronutrients, vitamins and enzymes. I also use it as a major component in my Lembas and sesame bars. In addition, honey is so sweet that you cannot eat a lot of it. Therefore there is less worry that you would dramatically increase your calorie intake. So, a perfect, healthy foodstuff. But, can we make it even better?

Well, the general answer is definitely! And essential oils are the exact answer. In theory they should easily mix with honey and we need only small quantities. Even though we only add a drop, they have a profound effect. First, we can vary the taste, which is now open to a whole spectrum of opportunities. To the base sweetness of honey we can add freshness of mint and citruses on one side and warmth and fire of spices on the other. Truly amazing.
But there is more. Beside the whole range of fabulous taste essential oils have even more in store. Herbs and their essential oils have a long history of use in home medicine. As with the taste, there is a herb for practically every maladie or illness. Throughout human history plants were studied and tested. And there is also a strong scientific background proving their efficacy, like this one and this one.

During my work I found out that you can flavor honey also with fruit tastes. But not the artificial ones, with approximate likeness to real fruit and no other value. Simple fruit flavors like apple or pear can be obtained by adding 5-10% by weight of fruit juice concentrate. You can also prepare the concentrate yourself, from fruit juices. And there are some truly unbelievable honeys – for instance this one with raspberries. However, I only learned this later, so there is another set of experiments which I need to perform, hopefully in the near future.

My experiments

So let’s try to mix a fabulous tasting and also healthy honey medicine. Essential oils from fennel , thyme and mentha piperita are among my favorite tastes. Beside excellent flavor, they are used in a number of herbal medicines and have some proven health effects. About 1-3 drops of each oil per 100 g of honey was more than enough. This is not a huge amount and you can be certain that you can not consume too much essential oil, since the honey sweetness will stop you. A perfect dosing system. It is super easy to mix the oil and the honey since they mix quite well. And even if your mixture is not completely homogeneous, the oil will diffuse and in a couple of hours you will have a perfect mix. The tastes are also nicely balanced, with starting fennel and thyme and long lasting fresh peppermint taste.

Below are some other examples of different mixes for different ailments. The essential oils should be given in about the same amounts, regardless of the oil type. This means around 1 to 3 drops of each essential oil per 100 g of honey. You can adjust the ratios and amounts to your taste or preferences, there is no fixed rule. Just one final word of caution. Not all essential oils are the same. Be sure to use the oils intended for human consumption, not just cosmetical or scenting purposes, since they tend to be of lower quality.