# Starter for Creamed Honey



## Steve in PA (Jan 26, 2015)

It's about the crystal formation. The starter has a smaller more organized crystal structure. The stuff you leave in your cabinet until it crystalizes has large, jagged, and disorganized crystals. The seed is like a lattice that grows.


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## missybee (Sep 6, 2014)

You can buy a creamed honey and use that as a starter. The finer the crystals, the smoother your creamed honey will be.


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## pjigar (Sep 13, 2016)

missybee said:


> You can buy a creamed honey and use that as a starter. The finer the crystals, the smoother your creamed honey will be.


Can you "blend" creamed honey or crystalized honey to create finer crystals?


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## crofter (May 5, 2011)

missybee said:


> You can buy a creamed honey and use that as a starter. The finer the crystals, the smoother your creamed honey will be.


Commercial creamed honey of recognized brands will almost undoubtably gone through the Dyce Method or something equivalent. It will have been heated and fine filtered to remove all wax and pollen particles. These particles are potential initiation points for irregular crystal development.

If you took your own honey and ground it to reduce crystal size it could be used for a starter but its content of pollen and wax particles would be an unknown variable. I came across a write up by an apiary in Manitoba whose honey is mostly from Canola and they cream all their honey which otherwise would be a quick and coarse crystallizer. They grind and condition their own honey as a starter and then innoculate each new batch with about a 10% addition of the previous batch.

A smooth creamed honey is more about the treatment of the starter than its origin. The better you filter your honey, the better the odds of getting a smooth and stable result.


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