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Introduction

This is a handbook for serious honey lovers. After all, who doesn’t love honey? If you don’t, perhaps you haven’t tasted the real thing! It’s been treasured, coveted, idolized, and even revered by all of the world’s major religions. It was hunted by primeval humans and was regarded as the food of Greek gods. Honey was so treasured by the early Romans, it was used to pay taxes. Through the ages honey has been the choice for ensuring good health, healing, and fertility. And honey has always been regarded as a natural, healthy ingredient for cooking, baking, beverages, and food accompaniments.

In recent years, honey has taken on even greater notice, with the ever-growing interest in beekeeping and the endless flavor profiles of each harvest, healthy eating, and the surge in social media and internet solely dedicated to epicurean delights. Today, honey has truly reached a celebrity food status, featured prominently on the menus of the world’s finest restaurants. In fact, honey is becoming acknowledged with the same reverence offered to wine, coffee, cheese, and olive oil.

About This Book

This book is a reference, not a lecture. You certainly don’t have to read it from beginning to end unless you want to. We organized the chapters in a logical fashion, each clustered under one of the book’s seven different parts. We included lots of great photographs and illustrations (we hope each is worth a thousand words) and lots of practical information, advice, instructions, and suggestions.

Just take a look at the sorts of things we’ve included. This book

 Travels back 10,000 years to share highlights of the role honey has played in cultures, religions, literature, and folklore

 Explains why and how bees make honey and how it’s harvested by honey gatherers and beekeepers

 Provides a listing of 50 different honey varietals from around the world, along with their botanical sources, regions produced, color, aroma, flavor, terroir, suggested food pairings, and interesting notes

 Describes honey’s role as a natural source of good health, providing nutritional facts and sharing information about honey’s use in apitherapy as a healing agent

 Includes recipes for honey-inspired remedies in the form of soaps, lotions, salves, exfoliates, elixirs, and beauty baths

 Helps you shop for honey by understanding the best places to buy, how to read and understand honey labels, and how to avoid honeys that may not be all that they claim

 Teaches you how to become a “honey sommelier” by understanding the skills for properly tasting, evaluating, and describing a honey’s sensory characteristics by using a subtle honey-centric vocabulary

 Introduces the role “terroir” plays in determining the unique characteristics and flavors of honeys

 Recognizes potential and avoidable defects in honey that are often the result of a beekeeper’s poor management practices

 Includes more than 50 delicious and tested recipes using honey in baking, cooking, cocktails and mocktails, and brewing honey wine (mead)

 Celebrates honey with some fun ideas for hosting a honey tasting party

We also include some back-of-book materials, including helpful honey-related resources: websites, honey suppliers, where to buy rare and hard-to-find honeys, schools that certify professional honey sensory experts, and a list of great honey festivals worth attending. We’ve created a glossary of honey terms that you can use as a handy quick reference and some useful templates for tasting notes and other honey-related logs.

Note: You may have noticed that two authors are listed on the cover. And yet in all of the pages that follow this introduction, the text is written in first person. A lot of what we’ve written is anecdotal, opinionated, and based on lots of personal experience. So writing in a singular voice is much easier and less cumbersome than attributing each individually to Marina or Howland. And after all, we totally agree with each other on everything. Mostly.

Foolish Assumptions

We assume there must be something about you that’s eager to know more about nature’s most glorious food: honey.

Whether you’re already quite knowledgeable about honey, or have just occasionally had honey on a slice of toast, we guarantee you will discover all sorts of new information. And it’s likely all readers will be inspired to try out more of the many hundreds of varietals of honey available to consumers. After all, honey is much more than clover and orange blossom.

For beekeepers, this book has lots of betcha-didn’t-know information about the treasured liquid gold that your bees produce. You will appreciate more than ever just how amazing and wonderful honey is. You will learn how to produce a better product and market it more effectively, through better beekeeping practices and effectively educating your customers about honey.

For consumers, chefs, cooks and foodies, this book will help you make informed choices about selecting and purchasing honey. You will understand the differences between a great honey and the ones to avoid. You will find out which honey varieties pair best with which foods. The book includes over 45 honey-inspired recipes for baking, cooking, and blending or brewing beverages with honey.

And for those with a yearning to become a honey sensory expert (honey sommelier), this book shows you the exact methods and detailed instructions for how to taste and evaluate honeys like a certified honey sensory professional.

Whichever of these categories you fit in, you’ll appreciate the way the book has been organized for easy and ongoing reference. In short, this book is for just about anyone who’s a fan of nature’s most celebrated all-natural food: honey.

Icons Used in This Book

Peppered throughout this book are helpful icons that present special types of information to enhance your reading experience and make you a stellar beekeeper.

Think of these tips as words of wisdom that — when applied — will make your honey experience sweet!

These warnings alert you to potential missteps that may make your experiences unpleasant and/or downright disappointing. Take them to heart!

We use this icon to point out things that need to be so ingrained in your consciousness that they become habits. Keep these points at the forefront of your honey knowledge and experience.

Beyond the Book

Much more information is available from your authors, and from the For Dummies brand, for your learning pleasure. “Bee” sure to check out the online Cheat Sheet, which contains handy tools you can use as you fine-tune your honey tasting skills.

To access this Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and enter “Honey For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.

Where to Go from Here

You can start anywhere with For Dummies books, but there’s a logic to beginning at the beginning. However, if that’s not in your personality, no problem. Consider starting with Chapter 17 and try one of the refreshing honey-infused cocktail or mocktail recipes. Then, while you’re sipping, move over to Chapter 1 and read some historical information about honey’s role in different cultures over the past 10,000 years. There’s lots of trivia here that’s sure to make you a honey superstar at your next party.

If you are keen on knowing how to professionally taste and evaluate honey, check out Chapter 9 to find out (scientifically) how your tasting apparatus actually works. Then try the tasting exercises to tune up your taste buds. Going on to Chapter 10, you can follow the same step-by-step methodologies used by certified honey sensory experts to taste, evaluate, identify, and describe different honeys’ characteristics and flavors. And now that you are becoming a tasting guru, hop back to Chapter 7. It profiles 50 of the world’s most famous varieties of honey. You can find detailed information, tasting notes, and food pairing suggestions for each of the honeys listed. We promise you’ll appreciate honey as you never have before.

Hungry? Why not jump to Chapters 15 and 16 to savor different honey recipes for cooking and baking. Many of these recipes were provided by renowned executive chefs. Chapter 14 has recipes for making honey wine (mead). Waasail!

Or if you just want to have some yum fun, Chapter 19 is all about how to plan and host a honey tasting party. There are ideas for the invitation, the menu, and how to set up honey games, music, contests, and of course, the main event — honey tasting. Please don’t forget to invite us authors!

Our advice is to not hurry through this book. There’s a ton of information here, and all of it will help you appreciate, better understand, and find new ways to use and enjoy honey. So, whether you just want to discover how to cook with honey or you’re planning to become certified as a honey sensory expert (sommelier), there’s an abundance of sweet stuff here just for you.

And, although this book includes some info about bees and how and why they make honey, if you want to know more about honey bees and the art of beekeeping, check out Beekeeping For Dummies, by Howland Blackiston (Wiley), and Honeybee, Lessons From an Accidental Beekeeper, by C. Marina Marchese (Black Dog & Leventhal).