Sorry about yesterday, I didn't remember to post until I was nearly asleep. But I had to tell you about the honey. And here are a couple of pictures.
As you see, Al is starting off in the simplest way, cutting the honeycomb into a bowl, melting it over warm water, letting the wax rise and then lifting it off and then rewarming and filtering the honey. There's all sorts of equipment he can buy, a centrifuge and so on, but this will do him for now. He says that this amount at a time is very simple and manageable and a lot less messy than he expected.
Nothing else to write about now, apart from biking into town to go to the bank and get some vegetables, nothing's happened here.
Oh, by the way, today is the last day of the English asparagus picking season, so if you want some, hot-foot it to the shops to get it, right now.
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18 comments:
Honey looks gorgeous!
Unlike Asparagus, which is as overated and unsatisfying as certain football teams.
Well, I look forward to trying the honey, but although I like the flavour I hardly use any. But I love asparagus - which has the advantage of not minding at all if it's picked just before use. It doesn't even need two hours notice.
I love honey. Mmmm...on very fresh bread, drizzled over a thick layer of unsalted butter...
*blots chin*
Wow! It looks amazing. I love honey too - as Roses says, on very fresh bread, with butter. I use it in carrot cake too, and a tiny bit in vinaigrette.
The smallest amount of mechanical processing the better, looks yummy.
This must be excellent honey. It is pure, the real stuff. All "brand" honey is mixed.
Asparagus season ends in Franconia on the Johannis-Tag, 24th of June. It started a bit late and the weather ... so they have still a lot of it and maybe it will be cheap in the last days.
The honey that Al sells in his shop is just as pure and locally produced - I never use the bland supermarket honey as it has no flavour.
Our asparagus season started late too, as it was a cold spring. They always stop cutting on the longest day.
What Rog said.
I lurve asparagus. With butter, sea salt and pepper. In risotto. In pies.
*sigh*
Why are you talking about food when I can't eat properly? No fair. I'm still sucking mashed potato. Ugh.
Yes Dave, but you don't eat vegetables at all if you can help it.
Roses, have I missed something? Why can't you eat?
I eat peas, and carrots.
Roses has had braces fitted to her teeth. She's trying to become a teenager.
I've not seen you eating carrots. Or peas, come to that, but I've not served you peas.
Raw carrots didn't really go with the dish you'd served. Not in my mind, anyway.
Nowadays I nearly always roast them. I may not so mistreat the fresh carrots, currently growing in my garden.
Is destroying the combs every time Al's only option? Don't his local BKA have an extractor he could borrow?
As it takes bees 7 times the weight of honey to make a weight of wax, this isn't a very 'cost effective' way to produce!
The only time we destroy combs is when we make cut comb - which commands a good price, as it involves destroying the wax combs.
But, nice to see some end product.
I agree, Dave. The carrots were cooked.
I don't know, BW, I expect there may be. This was, remember, his first attempt at extracting honey, something he'd rather been dreading (he wants bees, not honey), and he'd only been to a class about it that afternoon. I think he decided to do it on the spur of the moment - in part, at any rate, to have something special for his and Dilly's fathers as a present.
No, I meant they weren't roasted in honey, the way I currently eat them.
They certainly weren't. Honey might add interest to the flavour of stored winter carrots but these were lovely freshly-dug ones, that had only been topped and tailed 15 minutes earlier and they tasted of carrot.
Coincidentally just had a couple of spears of asparagus and a boiled egg, each salt and peppered and dipped in about half a teaspoon of mayonnaise, while dreaming of a toasted English muffin, generously buttered and drizzled with Al's lovely honey.
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