Click here to download a copy of our Cooking with Honey Kitchen Cheat Sheet.

 

RULE 1

Honey is largely fructose and is therefore much sweeter than refined sugar. Depending on the honey, it can be two or three times sweeter than sugar. For every 1 cup of sugar, substitute 1/2 to 2/3 cups of honey.

RULE 2

Honey is slightly acidic, so add a little baking powder (about 1/8 to 1/4 tsp per cup of sweetening) to most batters and dough.  This addition is unnecessary with yeast breads because the honey leavening thrives in the mildly acid environment of honey.

RULE 3

Honey burns faster than granulated sugar. Lower the heat on the stove and stir more often or reduce oven temperature by 25°F.

RULE 4

Honey adds liquid to a recipe. When honey is substituted for sugar in a recipe you must reduce the amount of liquid by ¼ cup for each cup of honey.

We all know that honey is delicious to eat and it's sugars are digested by your body much better than other sugars, but did you know that honey is good for your skin? Honey is used in bandaging to heal wounds as well as in body products. That's because honey is:

• Anti-bacterial, anti-microbial
• Anti-inflammatory
• Cleansing 
• Conditioning, softening and healing
• High in anti-oxidants
• Moisturizing which slows aging

Check out our video above to learn how to use honey as a face wash. Make sure you use raw honey or else you'll, most likely, be washing your face with corn syrup, not real honey. Yuck!

Our friends at Ola Hawaiian Body Products use our honey and beeswax in their face masks, foot creams and salves. My favorite is their new Aina Taro Honey Facial Mask. It's ideal for dry or mature skin. This almost edible mask is made with coconut milk, honey, taro, and banana to deeply hydrate and moisturize your skin. I cannot say enough great things about this company. They source local ingredients, make a great product for your skin and don't test on animals. They're definitely a company you can feel good about supporting! 

More about Ola Hawaiian Body Products

In 2005, on the Big Island, Ola Hawaiian Body Products came together to create a line of Green beauty products that create nourishment from the healing qualities of Hawaiian plants.

Ola Hawaiian Body Products' mission is to be a sustainable, environmentally and culturally conscious business. They create premium Hawaiian beauty products that share the cultural wisdom of “This Land of Aloha” with the rest of the world through their healing products.

Ola Hawaiian Body Products utilizes many locally sourced ingredients from The Big Island including Big Island Bees Organic Hawaiian Honey and beeswax.  

You can learn more about Ola Hawaiian Body Products at www.hawaiianbodyproducts.com.

It’s Summer Time in Hawaii! Summer is the time of the amazing Ohia Lehua honey harvest! We work very hard in the summer as the Lehua honey must be extracted and bottled immediately before it sets in the comb. The Lehua honey crystallizes within days so it demands extra care and a lot of extra work to get it packed within the month.

Here at Big Island Bees the packing room is bustling as we work overtime extracting and packing this exceptional honey before it sets in the comb. The extra labor is well worth the trouble as the Ohia Lehua is a very special honey; it was even selected to be part of the Slow Food movement’s The Ark of Taste.

The Ark of Taste is a living catalog of delicious and distinctive foods facing extinction.
To qualify for the Ark of Taste a product must be:

• Outstanding in terms of taste – as defined in the context of local traditions and uses
• At-risk biologically or as culinary traditions
• Able to be sustainably produced
• Culturally or historically linked to a specific region, locality, community or traditional production practice in the U.S.
• Produced in limited quantities, by farms or by small-scale processing companies, for home consumption, or, in the case of endangered plants and animals, for the purpose of regeneration

Endemic to Hawaii, the Ohi’a Lehua tree Metrosideros Polymorpha, is the first tree to grow directly out of the hardened black lava covering the island of Hawaii. The flowers of the Ohia tree are called Lehua and their brilliant red color contrasts vividly against the black rocks and the pale green greyness of the leaves.

The tree was considered sacred to the ancient Hawaiians, it’s wood was used to create tiki, the standards of the Kahili , kapa beaters , clubs and daggers. The flowers were used in lei making and for medicinal purposes.

The Lehua is the official flower of the island of Hawaii. It is also known as Pele’s Flower. In Hawaiian mythology, Ohia and Lehua were two lovers. The Volcano Goddess Pele desired Ohia, but Ohia only had eyes for Lehua and rejected Pele’s advances. In a jealous fit, the fiery tempered Pele turned Ohia into a twisted tree. Heartbroken Lehua pleaded with the other gods to help her. Out of pity, the gods turned Lehua into a flower, which they placed on Ohia's tree forever uniting the two lovers. The legend remains today that it will rain when a Lehua is plucked from the tree, signifying the tears of the separated lovers.

The residents of Hawaii cherish the Ohia Lehua honey. They recognize its unique quality , taste and its connection to these sacred islands. Most unfortunately, Ohia Lehua is facing the threat of extinction due to a Rapid Ohia Death (ROD) fungus that is spreading in the native forests. Click here to learn more about ROD. Luckily the areas where we keep our bees have not yet been affected. We hope that a cure to this problem will be found or that the spread can be kept to a minimum.

Beeswax candles add a warm, amber glow to your dinner table. Unlike paraffin candles, beeswax candles burn cleaner with no sticky, black soot. They also purify the air, burn slower, and are virtually dripless in a draft free environment.

We make beeswax candles for our museum, but you can make them just as easily at home. The video below shows you the step-by-step process to making beeswax candles using molds. You can also pour the beeswax into empty glass jars, but you will need a metal clamp and glue dot to hold the wick to the bottom of the jar.

What you will need is:

• Beeswax
• Wick (2/0 ply works for most candles 3" in diameter or less but consult your mold for the best size wick)
• Crockpot
• Candle Mold (we get ours at mannlakeltd.com)
• Scissors
• Wooden sticks or clothes pins
• Large needle or bobby pin
• Silicone Spray
• 2 Large Containers for Pouring Wax
• Rubber Bands
• Cotton Fabric Squares

In an interesting article written by Food Safety News, they tested honey from major grocery stores all over the U.S. and found that 75% of the honey tested contained no pollen in it. The problem with this is that most world food safety agencies state that honey that contains no pollen is not true honey. NPR’s food blog, the salt, posted a rebuttal to this article stating that some honey companies choose to ultra filter their honey to remove the pollen to keep their honey from crystallizing. Therefore, the pollen test is not a fair way to test whether honey is really honey.

What is Ultra Filtering?

Ultra filtering is a high-tech procedure where honey is heated, sometimes watered down and then forced at high pressure through extremely small filters to remove pollen, which is the only foolproof sign identifying the source of the honey. It is a spin-off of a technique refined by the Chinese, who have illegally dumped tons of their honey – some containing illegal antibiotics – on the U.S. market for years.” -Food Safety News.

What's our take on all this?

Honey is nectar from flowers mixed with bee enzymes and pollen. When you pasteurize honey, the enzymes are killed. When you ultra filter honey, the pollen is removed. What you are left with is not honey, but a sugar syrup variation of honey.

How to know what's in your honey

Buying organic honey, raw honey and/or local honey is always the best way to go. “Raw” is the term beekeepers use to let the consumer know their honey has not been pasteurized or ultra filtered. If you’re not sure if the honey is raw or had the pollen filtered out, contact the company and ask them. Most beekeepers are happy to explain how they harvest their honey.