201–210 of 241 posts
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If you /really/ want to be sure, buy comb honey. Impossible to fake.
Can't fake honeycomb be made and placed in to jars of fake honey?
If it ever becomes mainstream this will definitely happen.
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No, it's not. Honey is defined by the USDA as being flower nectar that's been processed by bees[1]. Artificial honey can not be called honey[2]. If they're mixing it with high fructose corn syrup, then there should be a way to scientifically determine that. [1] https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Extracted... [2] https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Extracted...
A 90s percent of honey is fructose, glucose, and water. A very high 90s percent of corn syrup is fructose, glucose, and water. Getting the ratios the same is trivial. There is nothing magical about fructose or glucose from different sources, they’re exactly the same simple molecule. If you had very clean corn syrup, you could undetectably dilute honey and it would be quite the same. Lab tests being what they are thes…
Of course they’ll likely be creamed honey rather than pourable, but that’s just a preference.
Here's a very straightforward guide to buying honey. If you see honey at a supermarket, no you don't, that's sugar syrup. If you see honey online, no you don't, that's sugar syrup. If you find an old dude with a small stand and a bunch of (most likely unlabelled) jars who only accepts cash, that's where you get real honey.
Can people see and taste the differences between (a) sugar syrup and (b) dehydrated flower nectar and liquid sugars? Certainly in the case of small scale harvesting in a traditional hive: it will be have ground up comb, dead bee parts and gas that, in my opinion, adds little.
Sometimes bees get into stuff like a cherry syrup factory and they barf out blue food coloring into the cells which dehydrate and become blue honey, which you can also see.
Do people physiologically interact with something in the honey other than its sugar? Like is there something missing from sugar syrup? One clinically proven difference is that honey is an effective antibiotic on wounds whereas sugar syrup is not. Of course besides antibiotics in the honey, the bee barfs out other stuff that gets in there that can affect the development of bees, and trace amounts of pollen and bee poop get in it too, but I don’t think any of that interacts with us.
It’s a complex problem. You can easily read more about it, bees are well studied animals. For most culinary purposes you don’t want weird solids, moisture, gas and contaminants like that, so industrial honey suits people better anyway. But if you are applying it to a wound you want bee produced honey without comb, which readily exists in the medical supply chain. It is not accurate to say that the small town seller is the only source, or even the best source, of “real honey.”
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My brother in law owns bees and gifts us honey. One is strong, thick, crystallised easily. One is thin and flows very easily, very see through. These things aren’t good indicators of adulteration at all
Is it like a bloom filter? Crystallizes easily means real? Doesn’t crystallize easily means unknown?
It also depends on the sort of processing done. Commercial honey is pasturised, but local suppliers might not.
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My brother in law owns bees and gifts us honey. One is strong, thick, crystallised easily. One is thin and flows very easily, very see through. These things aren’t good indicators of adulteration at all
Is it like a bloom filter? Crystallizes easily means real? Doesn’t crystallize easily means unknown?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 90s percent of honey is fructose, glucose, and water. A very high 90s percent of corn syrup is fructose, glucose, and water. Getting the ratios the same is trivial. There is nothing magical about fructose or glucose from different sources, they’re exactly the same simple molecule. If you had very clean corn syrup, you could undetectably dilute honey and it would be quite the same. Lab tests being what they are thes…
Orange juice is more than 90% water, but you would need to get your sense of taste checked if you confused it with sugar water. By the same token if you can’t taste the difference between sugar syrup and honey, then you need to get your taste checked, or perhaps you’ve never had real honey. The flavors in honey are also deeply affected by what the bees eat. Buckwheat honey is a totally different thing than Tupelo hon…
Once the juice is squeezed and stored in gigantic vats, they start removing oxygen. Why? Because removing oxygen from the juice allows the liquid to keep for up to a year without spoiling. But! Removing that oxygen also removes the natural flavors of oranges. Yeah, it’s all backwards. So in order to have OJ actually taste like oranges, drink companies hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that make perfumes for Dior, to create these “flavor packs” to make juice taste like, well, juice again.
https://gizmodo.com/dirty-little-secret-orange-juice-is-arti...>
And that's for product actually marketed as orange juice, rather than, say, a sweetened citrus-flavoured beverage, for which the first ingredient often is sugar and/or corn syrup, e.g., "True Orange Mango Orangeade":
Ingredients: Cane sugar, crystallized orange (ctiric acid, orange juice, orange oil), natural flavor, stevia leaf extract, beet juice and beta-carotene.
(Beet juice and stevia are both sweeteners, the first is effectively liquid sugar, the second is a non-caloric / low-caloric non-sugar sweetener.)
https://www.truecitrus.com/products/true-orange-mango-orange>
The fact that you're better off either squeezing your own or better yet eating whole fruit is a whole 'nother matter.
A more detailed production process:
"How products are made: Orange juice":
https://www.madehow.com/Volume-4/Orange-Juice.html>
the reason that adulterated honey is difficult to detect is that honey is just sugar syrup, and if you add more sugar syrup you'll get more sugar syrup than you started with. the mistaken belief is that there is something special about natural honey. people: it's sugar syrup, it'll give you diabetes as fast as a truckload of mountain dew. Now, I don't believe in homeopathy, perhaps you do. But that's what the honey c…
In addition to flavour compounds from the nectar, honey contains trace amino acids that cause it to slowly undergo the malliard reaction at room temperature, resulting in a caramel undertone that increases as the honey ages.
The flavour also strongly depends on the nectar, with some being very subtle and resulting in a very syrup-like honey, and others being extremely strong.
Other than flavour, and some anti-microbial properties, it has the same dietary properties as sugar syrup.
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We buy from Costco and most/all of it crystallizes after some time. Not sure if that makes it good honey, but there’s that.
You can heat it in a microwave to reverse the crystallization. Do not do this ifs the honey is in a squeezable bear container. The honey will boil, make a hole in the bear and spray honey all over the inside of your microwave (the turntable helps this). This will make a huge mess and will make opening the microwave more challenging.
You can double-boil if you want, where the jar sits in a shallow water bath which you boil for 10--20 minutes or so to decrystalise the honey.
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If you /really/ want to be sure, buy comb honey. Impossible to fake.
Can't fake honeycomb be made and placed in to jars of fake honey?
This is shades of "if you can fake sincerity you can fake anything":
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/05/fake-honesty/>
(Uncertain origin, though often attributed to Groucho Marx, George Burns, Jean Giraudoux, Celeste Holm, Ed Nelson, Samuel Goldwyn, Daniel Schorr, Joe Franklin, and/or Anonymous.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My brother in law owns bees and gifts us honey. One is strong, thick, crystallised easily. One is thin and flows very easily, very see through. These things aren’t good indicators of adulteration at all
Is it like a bloom filter? Crystallizes easily means real? Doesn’t crystallize easily means unknown?