THE TRUTH ABOUT HONEY: HERE'S HOW IT REALLY IS

Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the gourmands at online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat it and what to cook. This time our cheffies serve you: the truth about honey: here's how it really is.

Liquid Dutch flower honey, Veluwe heather honey, comb honey: what is actually what? Gerard van de Braak, beekeeper at De Valksche Bijenhof, gives us advice, and he should know because he takes care of five hundred bee colonies. ‘Cold extracted, that's actually nonsense. You can't even extract it warm.’

In the peak season, when all his bee colonies are at their strongest, Gerard and three employees take care of a rough 25 million bees. They also breed queens, make honey, and sell colonies to other beekeepers. So you can safely call him a ‘super beekeeper’. So if you want to learn something about good honey, Gerard is your man.

To begin with: vegans wonder if they can still eat avocado because the plant is pollinated by bees. Is it sad and unnatural if the bees pollinate plants in greenhouses and on agricultural land?
‘Our bees get to work in the spring to fertilize red currant bushes, and sometimes they work in greenhouses. Do they like that? When we close the beehive, they don't really enjoy it, and transporting them gives them a bit of stress. But then they arrive at a place where they have a great time. Large fields with billions of flowers, where they can eat what they want. You could say it's a paradise. So I don't think you need to feel sorry for the bees.’

How do you explain the price difference between the honey in squeeze bottles at the supermarket and the expensive jars you can buy from a beekeeper?
‘You have to ask yourself what that cheap honey actually is. The cheapest honey comes from South America and China. Recently, I saw a jar of honey with an ingredient label on the packaging. I mean: why? Honey is supposed to be a hundred percent honey, right? Unfortunately, that's not always the case. Especially when you buy cheap honey, there's a good chance it's not completely pure.’

So cheap honey is usually not that great, but does that mean expensive honey is always good?
‘No, it's not that easy to say. Take Manuka honey from Australia. It is supposed to be a kind of miracle honey, healing and curative, a whole marketing story. And very expensive, right? A group of HBO students looked into it, and what turns out? Our Dutch honey is better than that expensive honey from Australia.’

On the label of honey, it sometimes says: cold extracted. What is that?
‘A bit of a strange term, because honey is always cold extracted. If you were to heat the combs before extracting, the wax from the honeycombs would melt and end up in small chunks in your honey. That's not the intention. All honey you buy in the supermarket is heated anyway. You lose valuable enzymes in the honey, and those are precisely what are so healthy for you. If the honey crystallizes, you can gently warm it au bain-marie in a pan until it becomes clear again, but nothing more.‘

And honey in tea then?
‘That makes me laugh a bit. People do that to get rid of their sore throat or because they have a cold. But if you put honey in boiling hot tea, all the beneficial substances in that honey are really gone. You should let your tea cool down and then stir in the honey, but cold tea doesn't seem very nice to me either. Just take a spoonful of honey straight from the jar. That's much better.’

And organic honey, is that always good?
‘In the Netherlands, yes, although a lot of honey here is organic but not certified. That certificate costs a lot of money and a lot of time, due to the administration involved. On the other hand: most organic honey from Germany comes from bees flying around the Ruhr area. Nice and organic!’

Are there any other important differences between beekeeper honey and supermarket honey?
‘The taste, of course. In supermarkets, you can almost exclusively buy blends. Dutch beekeepers harvest dozens of different honey flavors and keep them separate. The flowers from which the nectar comes determine the taste of the honey. This results in, for example, Veluwe heather honey with a very strong spicy flavor, but also typical spring honey with a mild fruity touch.’

If you want to be sure it's good, which honey should you buy?
‘Then I would buy local honey. Just look for a beekeeper nearby and go there. That's quite different from large companies that remain anonymous. The very best? Comb honey, so with a piece of honeycomb already in the jar. Nothing is done with it, it's just taken straight from the beehive and put in a jar. It's a kind of mentality: I see people happily paying thirty euros for a kilo of eel, but five euros for a jar of good honey is then too expensive. As a consumer, you have the opportunity to determine what you buy and where you spend your money. If we keep buying everything as cheaply as possible, then quality will suffer, it can't be otherwise.’