How sweet it is: Artisan honey creating a buzz

Next time you drizzle honey on an English muffin, look at the honey. I mean really look at it. Does it have reddish highlights, an amber hue or a pale straw tone? Is the scent reminiscent of lavender, clover, alfalfa? Does the honey glide smoothly across your palate or brush your taste buds with delicate crystals?

One is not necessarily better than the other. The point here is that honey, like wine, is a product of its environment and in this age of back-to-simpler-times food production, honey afficionados want consumers to know that all honey doesn't, well, look like honey.

Most of us grew up with the iconic bear jar filled with sticky, gold liquid that we squeezed onto toast or into tea, but head to the gourmet shop, farmers market or grocery store and you're faced with a host of varieties.

"The colors vary because of how the honey is processed," explains chef Randy Zweiban of Province in Chicago.

"Artisan honey tends to be lighter than the amber honey in the supermarket. Some are going to be sweeter, some will be more herbaceous."

Bee wrangler Doug Schulz describes his honey as "clean, smooth, light, fresh and buttery with no after taste." Schulz has been tending bees for 33 years and produces Wisconsin Natural Acres honey in Chilton, Wis.

Schulz makes 15,000-plus pounds of honey in a good year. Experts with the National Honey Board estimate about 30 million pounds of honey is sold each year at farmers markets and roadside stands.

For comparison's sake, North Dakota, the top honey producing state, produced 35.1 million pounds of honey in 2008; about 400 million pounds of honey gets produced nationwide.

Still, Schulz belongs to a shrinking group of artisan bee keepers. Bruce Wolk director of Marketing for the National Honey Board, says the number of commercial bee keepers is declining as well, paralleling the country's overall decline in agriculture.

"It's a shame; it's a piece of Americana that's going away," Wolk says. Hobbyists or part-time bee keepers (though Schulz will tell you he hardly works part-time) who keep 25 to 299 hives are responsible for 40 percent of the country's honey production.

Wolk says its too soon to tell if the movement to source local ingredients will turn the trend around.

"Keeping bees is hard work," he says, comparing it to caring for a new puppy, but without the benefit of having a furry friend to curl up with at the end of the day.

In Schulz's case, he raises bees, between 7 and 10 million of them, like people did in the 1800s. He tends to the apiaries by hand, moving them around acres of Wisconsin farmland that he tests annually to be sure its free of herbicides and pesticides. He smokes the hives with organic apple wood and winters them in dirt-floor rooms built in the late 1880s. The heat generated by the bees keep the room near 40 degrees in the depths of winter, he says.

Schulz recently has been visiting suburban stores to show people that honey can be used for more than just toast. While he enjoys it on toast with butter and cinnamon, he says it's a great partner for cheese, blue cheese especially.

When swapping honey for granulated sugar in recipes, begin by substituting honey for up to half of the sugar called for in the recipe. Because of its high fructose content, it takes less honey to sweeten tea and other items.

When baking, reduce the oven temperature by 25 degrees to prevent over-browning. In addition, reduce any liquid by ¼ cup for each cup of honey used and add ½ teaspoon baking soda for each cup of honey added.

Chef Zweiban enjoys honey's natural complexity and uses it across the menu. He adds it to barbecue sauce, infuses it with lavender (that grows at his home garden) and mixes it into glazes.

"I love using it as a paint for poultry; honey with duck or squab."

I found it to be a wonderful partner for balsamic vinegar, tempering the tanginess and adding another level of flavor.

How sweet is that?

Sweet statistics

• It takes roughly 1 million miles of bee flight to produce 1 pound (about 1⅓ cups) of honey.

• A honey bee visits 50-100 flowers on each collecting trip.

• Without honey bees there would be no almonds.

• Honey is produced in every state. The top five producers, in order, are North Dakota, South Dakota, California, Florida and Minnesota.

• Americans consume an average of 1.29 pounds of honey a year.

• Before World War I doctors used honey to dress wounds and draw out infection.

• A dab of honey will dull pain from a bee sting.

National Honey Board and Daily Herald interviews

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