# $78 for 9 ounces of honey.....the future



## Ross (Apr 30, 2003)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/dining/14hone.html
TED DENNARD, founder of the Savannah Bee Company, says 2004 produced the best orange blossom honey the South has seen in decades.
But you never know. "Last year was an awful year for basswood," said Zeke Freeman, owner of Bee Raw Honey, blaming an early summer drought in New York.
And Neal Rosenthal, who imports Mario Bianco brand honeys from Italy, in rare flavors like dandelion, lime blossom and eucalyptus, wistfully recalled, "We still talk about the remarkable chestnut honey of 1983." 
It's apt that Mr. Rosenthal imports wine as well as honey. Many of the same factors that distinguish a reserve cru from a pitcher of house red  a distinct varietal, a particular place, propitious bursts of sun and rain  determine whether honey is packaged in a costly jar or pumped into a plastic bear-shape bottle. And with more single-flower honeys on store shelves and farmers' market tables, chefs have been dispatching their wildly different flavors to dishes the way sommeliers pair wine with food.
At 5 Ninth, Zak Pelaccio has used musky, mentholated corbezzolo honey (from a wild berry bush in Sardinia) in rabbit ragù, and floral chrysanthemum honey in braised pork belly. There's Finger Lakes knotweed honey the color of merlot at the Tasting Room, and cranberry, star thistle and orange blossom varieties at Johnny Iuzzini's recent honey tasting at Jean Georges.
When Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef at Prune, recruited the cookbook author Diane Kochilas's Greek beans with honey and dill to serve with her Berkshire country ribs, she swapped in a fierce chestnut honey for its cedary, not-so-sweet overtones. 
"I'm a collector of honey  I use them all," said Bobby Flay, whose latest favorite, tupelo honey, is harvested in Georgia swamps and tastes like butter and cotton candy. He says he uses more familiar single-flower honeys, which can taste vaguely of their sources, to reinforce flavors in a dish  orange blossom honey, say, in his tangerine salsa.
Last year, the brothers behind Blue Ribbon restaurants, Eric and Bruce Bromberg, opened the city's first honey bar, serving Mexican varieties they're importing with their longtime chef, Felix Vaquero, whose father has kept bees outside Puebla for 45 years. At the bar at their sliver of a market on Bedford Street in the Village, counter cooks drizzle your pick of six over open-faced smoked duck sandwiches. 
"Before they opened, I really didn't know there was a difference in honey, to be honest," said Alex Rascovar, who works across the street and pops in often for a quick fix of butter and honey toast sprinkled with Maldon sea salt.
Single-flower honeys, produced when bees feast on one type of abundant blossom, have always played a role in regional cooking. French chefs have long shellacked game birds with their indigenous lavender honey, and Italians seem to have an inborn appreciation for chestnut honey's bitter astringency. At Kellari, a Greek taverna in Midtown, there's resinous pine honey in the olive marinade, and thyme honey with yogurt for dessert. (Beekeepers confirm fidelity to the flowers with pollen lab tests, by the way.)
As global pantries grow, cooks are learning to work with unusual newcomers like the pearly, thick Hawaiian kiawe honey or spicy Tasmanian leatherwood honey. 
"It's skyrocketing now," says Bill Yosses, chef of the recently shuttered Josephs Citarella, who discussed cooking with these varietals during a recent class on fragrance in food for New York University. 
Mr. Yosses recommends waiting until the late stages of cooking to add mild honey. More aggressive honeys can be added earlier to soups and braises, because their flavors can stand to be toned down. Shea Gallante, of Cru, often caramelizes honey in a pan and deglazes with vinegar. He also uses honey to add heft to vinaigrettes, including one made with almond oil and orange blossom honey, which he drizzles over pan-seared scallops.
Zeke Freeman, a former chef who founded Bee Raw Honey last year, doesn't expect chefs to use his honey with abandon. At $14 for an 8-ounce jar, and $78 for a tasting flight of nine packaged in cork-topped single-ounce vials, plus shipping, from beeraw.com, they're best used like a finishing oil or fine balsamic vinegar. At Chanterelle, the fromager, Adrian Murcia, serves Mr. Freeman's tart, rare Appalachian sourwood honey with a schmear of triple-cream Brillat-Savarin cheese (named after the famous epicure), a combination he says has caused a few customers to swoon.
It can be a challenge to get people to splurge on the good stuff, Mr. Freeman says, when you can still buy a jar of honey for the cost of a cappuccino. So, on sales pitches to chefs, and in classes he teaches at Murray's Cheese Shop, he tries to reclaim the sense of place honey lost when it became a homogenized supermarket staple.
"U.S.D.A. Grade A honey is a color, not a flavor," Mr. Freeman said, explaining how honey companies buy from many beekeepers around the country, then blend their purchases to achieve that picture-perfect golden hue and predictable flavor. 
Unlike raw honey, commercial honey is heat-treated and filtered, which Mr. Freeman believes strips it of its nuanced flavor and most healthful attributes. (Raw honey may contain bee residue that people highly allergic to pollen or bees could react to, allergists warn.) 
Specialty items like his are coming just in time, industry experts say. With honey prices low and 55 percent of the market imported (according to the National Honey Board), American beekeepers are lured into more profitable uses of their hives. In the last 25 years, because of environmental factors, the bee population has shrunk 50 percent for kept bees and 90 percent for wild, so farmers with crops reliant upon bee pollination, like almonds, rent bees.
But lately, beekeepers have realized single-flower or local honey gives new meaning to the phrase "liquid gold." 
"You'll double your income over what you received from the packer," said Don Tremblay, a Finger Lakes beekeeper who once sold bulk but now sells raspberry, locust tree, bamboo and other honeys at city Greenmarkets.
Despite his niches, Mr. Tremblay says varietal worship should not discount the beauty of a good wildflower honey, which changes as the season progresses, creating a edible snapshot of the many flowers blooming at the time.
Ron Suhanosky, the chef at Sfoglia, an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side, tosses pale spring wildflower honey from a beekeeper in Nantucket, where he has another restaurant, with flash-fried calamari. In the fall, the beekeepers' darker honey becomes a cloak for fried rabbit. 
Wildflower honey is the only kind urban beekeepers can harvest, which makes it a favorite of Tom Mylan, a buyer for Marlow & Sons, the specialty food market attached to the restaurant Diner, in Williamsburg. 
"There's this really intense matrix of other plants that they're feeding off, so it's a little more complicated," he said. Some of his most devoted customers include hay fever sufferers who believe eating local honey can alleviate their symptoms.
One of his coveted jars is filled by Roger Repohl, a music director who lives in the rectory of St. Augustine Catholic Church in the Bronx, and has become a mentor to a burgeoning clan of city beekeepers. 
One recent afternoon, Mr. Repohl sat at the rectory's communal dining room table, tasting the sweetness of New York City. On a placemat embroidered with beehives, there was honey from Central Park, honey from Fort Greene, honey from a community garden tended by teenagers in East New York, and, closest to his heart, half a dozen jars from hives just outside his kitchen door, honey ranging in color from spring's pale straw (one main source being linden blooms) to autumn's dark ale (colored by goldenrod nectar). 
"I like the summer honey," said Gwendolyn Johnson, who has cooked at the rectory for 35 years. "It's got a hint of mint."
But not everything tasted so good. A spoonful of honey he harvested at the Bronx Zoo brought a mild grimace to Mr. Repohl's face. "There are a lot of weird things growing in that zoo," he said, and cleared his palate with a sip of water.


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## Hillside (Jul 12, 2004)

Note to self.

Marketing Plan:

Choose a hive. On one side plant a golden privet. On the other side fill a large bucket with water, add some soil and grow bull rushes.

Sell the honey from that hive as Goldrush Honey, $740 per troy ounce.


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## Ross (Apr 30, 2003)

I like it. You better hurry


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## John Russell (Aug 8, 2003)

Excellent article.
Thanks for posting it.

John Russell


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## jamiev (Sep 14, 2005)

read it in the NYT several weeks ago Nice!! Hope we all get gourmet status honey sometime soon. This fun hobby could become quite profitable !!!


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