Comment by dxbydt
9 years ago
Honey is a strange alternative to sugar. For the past 2 decades, I have used honey as the sole sweetener, though the rest of the family continues to patronize sugar :( The trouble with honey is that it's seriously pricey, and the community is a something of a cult - you have to know a lot of the terminology, otherwise you'll walk out with sugar-water. I take an empty 1 gallon jar to the honey store in Sac, and pay $100 to fill her up. I have experimented a lot with the cocktail over the years. Generally, avoid anything"American" ie. sweet light colored honey. Go for the raw unfiltered darkest thickest broth you can find. They have gigantic jars of various colors, so I sample from the darkest ones. Then add a few grams of propolis and a few scoops of nectar and a few combs. Top it off with manuka and part with $100. Lasts 3 months. It tastes weird and too thick and gooey, but it's an amazing product. All the debris floating around on it is supposedly packed with enzymes etc.
There isn't a significant health benefit to using honey over refined sugars. Sugar is sugar.
Sugar is sugar, but honey is interesting in the flavors and aromas it can provide outside of your standard white sugar.
Just to add if anyone is interested in honey as a sweetener - What dxbydt was saying with honey being ~$8/lb is a good price for identifiable flower honey. Wholesale is roughly $4-5/lb, depending on varietal.
There's a significant range in flavors and aromas depending on what type of flower produced the bulk of the honey. Don't need to avoid anything on colors, it's primarily based on what type of flower is used to produce the honey. Try a sampler, most apiaries/honey specialty shops will sell you a small container of each varietal they have. Avoid heat treated honeys, heating the honey to have it pass through a filter will get rid of a lot of the aroma. You'll see a lot of "raw, unfiltered" at specialty shops.
If you're interested, you can ferment meads with a minimum of ~1.5 pounds per gallon, depending on how strong you want the resulting beverage.
1 gallon of honey lasts you three months? I have a 12 oz jar that has lasted me almost a year, and I use honey closely to exclusively.
1 gallon honey over 3 months is about 11 teaspoons of sugar equivalent.
It's about 184 calories of honey/day.