The Tastes of Honey
At a Food Arts tasting, chefs gain new perspectives on the spectrum of honeys. Julian Brizzi reports. Photos by Sam Yocum.
Julian Brizzi reports.
Of all the just-folks food artisans who breathed life into the Smithsonian Institute’s 39th annual Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., last summer, Zeke Freeman’s beekeeping demonstrations and the varietal honeys he supplied chef Frank Morales for a dinner at Zola (Washington, D.C.) created a lot of buzz. Morales had concerns about basing an entire dinner on Freeman’s quiver of honeys, assuming they would lend each dish a generic sweetness, but when he tasted each of the honeys gathered by beekeepers scattered throughout the United States he discovered “a great diversity among them,” with flavors ranging from the simply sweet to the surprisingly deep and earthy.
By late summer, Morales was comfortable enough to put his newly found dexterity with honey on display during a tasting of Freeman’s varietals arranged by Food Arts at Dan Barber’s Blue Hill in New York City. Joining Morales and Freeman were affineur Liz Thorpe of Murray’s Cheese, who coupled honeys and cheeses, and pastry chef/mixologist Yvan Lemoine, who created a honey-laced drink. Among the panelists were Marcus Samuelsson (Aquavit and Riingo, New York City), Vicki Wells (executive pastry chef, Mesa Grill, Bolo, and Bar Americain, New York City; Mesa Grill Las Vegas), Sam Mason (pastry chef, WD-50, New York City), Juan Cuevas (chef de cuisine, Blue Hill), filmmakers Antonio Ferrera and Nelson Walker of Maysles Films, and, of course, Barber.
The purpose of the tasting, according to Freeman, was “to break through the counterintuitiveness of cooking with these pure raw varietal honeys by challenging some of the most creative and insightful chefs to do what they do best, invent and reinvent food.” Each panelist was presented with a wooden tray holding 10 wax-sealed test tubes of honey in hues ranging from light pollen-yellow to dark molasses. Freeman, who left his position as the specialty food buyer for Dean & DeLuca in early 2005 to purchase Beehive Bee Products from its founder, Anne Becker, and now markets the honey under the BeeRaw label, provided brief descriptions, including the origin and flavors or particular characteristics to look for in each honey:
Basswood (New York State)—light; delicate and crisp; clean finish; herbal scents
Blueberry (Maine)—amber; rich and dense; prone to crystallization; strong sweet earthy taste; buttery smell
Buckwheat (New York State)—opaque and dark brown; malty flavor with pronounced finish; strong but not very sweet; earthy hay aroma
Cranberry (Wisconsin)—medium amber; mildly tart with pungent lingering finish; delicate cranberry smell
Desert wildflower (Arizona)—light to medium amber; complex flavors with sharp sweet finish; sources include mesquite and cat’s claw flowers
Orange blossom (Florida)—medium amber; thick and full-bodied; smooth with citrus finish; floral aroma
Raspberry (Maine)—pale yellow; opaque when crystallized; mellow and smooth; light floral flavor; scents of cocoa butter and perfume
Sage (California)—translucent yellow; mild; a bit peppery
Saw palmetto (Florida)—medium amber; full-bodied; citrus and herbal flavors with woody overtones and a strong finish
Sourwood (North Carolina)—medium amber; doesn’t crystallize; sour and tart with hints of maple; warm finish
As the panelists tasted, each shared honey remembrances from their youths. “I grew up on honey being that stuff in the little plastic bear,” Mason recalled. Samuelsson remembered drinking tej, a honey-based Ethiopian libation the color of orange juice. Wells’ Italian grandmother made fried dough with honey every Sunday morning for her. Cuevas and Morales, both Puerto Rican, grew up with a diet of fatty foods, which pair very well with honey. “I take my traditional foods and sort of layer them with sweet, sour, and bitter,” Morales said, “and the honey is a wonderful tool to elevate that so much more.”
Morales then provided the group with a small sampling of the dishes he served in tandem with the Smithsonian’s Food Culture U.S.A. event, beginning with an heirloom tomato salad with Bayley Hazen Blue cheese (both fresh and fried), orange rind, olive oil, Champagne vinegar, and Florida saw palmetto honey. Although interesting, the combination of tomatoes and honey received a somewhat mixed response from the group. Following the tasting, Morales admitted that “cranberry honey would have been better in the tomato dish, rather than the saw palmetto, because it has more viscosity and its texture would hold up to the tomatoes more.” Morales’ yellow clover honey corn cakes, made with semolina, fresh corn, heavy cream, butter, mascarpone cheese, eggs, and sweet yellow clover honey received a more favorable reception. Served just above room temperature, with the semolina’s graininess echoing crystallized honey, they were garnished with fresh corn and topped with a piece of honeycomb. The flavor and texture of warm fresh honey remained decidedly at the forefront of the cakes but not so much as to make them excessively sweet or heavy, as many baked honey dishes tend to be. Rather, they had a mellow flavor and a light texture. The corn cakes were served at Zola until mid-September with roasted quail breasts, quail leg confit, a corn cracker, and a “fiery plum sauce.” As a dessert, Morales served a buckwheat honey sabayon accompanied by fresh peaches.
For his honey drink Lemoine created on the spot a soda with fresh lime, grapefruit, and orange blossom honey, blended, then dispensed from a foamer. Not wanting to distract the palate from the taste of honey, Lemoine decided to leave out the Tequila and jalapeño, which he had thought he’d use “to really complete the drink.” Even without them, the light aromatic soda was a success. Although orange blossom honey tends to be overpoweringly sweet and syrupy, the acidity of lime and grapefruit juice along with carbonation cut any syrupiness from the drink. “Honey is so thick,” explained Lemoine, “it actually coats your palate. But when lightened by bubbles, you taste the honey more.”
Drinks can also be made with mead, the honey wine believed to be the oldest alcoholic beverage in the world (mead producers often boast of it as the drink of Bacchus, Beowulf, and Shakespeare), especially now that producers have begun to either infuse their wines with flavors such as the pomegranate mead made by Full Circle Brewing Company of Fresno, California, or employ a combination of honeys and flavors, such as the orange blossom/desert blossom with juniper mead, alfalfa blossom/blackberry blossom with red grapes, and clover blossom/orange blossom with blueberries, among many others made by Redstone Meadery of Boulder, Colorado. These souped-up meads present countless opportunities for cocktails such as the Meadjito, a take on the Mojito, using muddled fresh mint and sugar, lime juice, rum, and black raspberry–infused mead.
Thorpe brought six cheeses to sample with the honey tasting: Mettowee, fresh goat’s milk cheese from Bardwell Farm in southern Vermont; San Andreas, a raw sheep’s milk cheese from Bellwether Farms in California, with a clean grassy taste; Toussaint, a firm sharp pasteurized cow’s milk cheese from Sprout Creek Farm in Poughkeepsie, New York; hardwood Smoked Gouda from Taylor Farm in Londonderry, Vermont; Jasper Hill Farm’s Bailey Hazen Blue from northern Vermont, the same cheese Morales used for the heirloom tomato salad, aged four months in natural caves and with a flavor similar to Stilton; and Pleasant Ridge Reserve, a rich buttery raw cow’s milk cheese from the Uplands Cheese Company in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, judged best of show at the 2005 American Cheese Society conference. Fat content was universally agreed upon as a unifying factor in creating successful dishes with honey, explaining why dairy products like cheese and ice cream and barbecue go so well with it. Said Barber, during the cheese/honey tasting: “Zeke, you’ve nurtured nature here.”
Morales, discussing his frequent use of honey at Zola, suggested using liquid nitrogen to freeze honeycomb to create a “tempura-like crispiness.” Unfortunately for him, Zola’s proximity to the FBI building prohibits him from using liquid nitrogen for security reasons. At WD-50, Mason makes garlic honey by vacuum-sealing garlic with honey so that each integrates the other’s flavors and texture through osmosis. “The garlic is delicious, and so is the garlic-flavored honey,” said Mason. “We serve the garlic raw, sliced paper thin on the corned duck appetizer.
As much as everyone found the honey tasting useful to some degree, the idea of using varietal honeys did raise some important issues. Barber, who has recently begun cultivating his own apiary at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York, observed that customer interest in the product may not equal the price increase for varietal rather than mass-produced honey. “The story you’re selling is as important as the flavor. For chefs, the price is everything, so here is an opportunity to allow chefs to think about honeys, but there’s got to be a story behind it. The customer has to be willing to pay more for special honey.” Though a product may be interesting or useful to a chef, without the enthusiasm of customers, a boutique product is simply not economically viable.
The purity of the honeys also posed a problem for Barber, as “the more you taste the honeys, the more you don’t want to disrupt their flavors.” Wells, agreeing, said, “They’re great, but they’re just so pure that I feel as though I mess around with stuff too much to use them. I think about ice cream, flan, custards—I would have to have the honey be the main thing, rather than complement it with something else.” Nonetheless, Wells has integrated some of the BeeRaw honeys into her menu at Bar Americain, making a crêpe filled with apples pan-roasted in chestnut honey, cider vinegar, and Calvados, drizzled with a cider reduction, and served with hard cider/chestnut honey ice cream. At Bolo, as part of the tapas special, she’s added an olive oil/orange blossom honey ice cream filled with a couscous crunch and served with an orange/date salad moistened with orange blossom honey. Also, Johnny Iuzzini, pastry chef at Jean Georges in New York City, has recently created a “Honey-Nut” tasting of four preparations using four different varietal honeys.
As much as the discussion revolved around new uses for honey, many chefs thought the honeys’ purity to be their main selling point, which is a deterrent to actually cooking with them. “If honey’s the main event, then with something like duck sauce, it’s about which ingredient you want to highlight,” Samuelsson wondered. “Once you have a great ingredient, you have the right to play with that, or do you want to use it as a premium ingredient and not mention it?”
“Endless freedom is my first impression,” Barber said about the different honeys, “but the more you taste them, the less you want to disrupt their integrity.”
With that in mind, Morales found dishes with honey as the prominent flavor “incredibly difficult” to match with wine, saying that “there have to be other components in the dish” to make it wine-friendly.
But as Samuelsson noted at the conclusion of the tasting: “Zeke, you’re educating chefs and consumers by presenting honey this way. If you want to change patterns, you need to do this. By the way, is it bad form to go for seconds?”
“No,” Freeman replied. “Go ahead.”
