Choosing honey: 5 signs of quality honey
1. Thick… Honey can be liquid for a long time. Plus, imported honey can retain its liquid consistency due to a special filtration method when it is heated for a short time. Everything else is fake.
2. Homogeneous… There should be no lumps and division into layers.
3. Flowing down from a spoon, it is folded up in a “slide”… If it just spreads, it means that there is too much moisture in it and it can ferment. If you scoop up liquid honey with a spoon and lift it over the jar, the thread should be at least 40 cm long.
4. Has no caramel smell and taste… And if they are, it means that the bees were fed with sugar water or overheated the honey during distillation. And this is even worse – at high temperatures honey loses its useful properties and even becomes dangerous: carcinogenic substances are formed in it. Good honey has a slight sore throat, leaving a pleasant long aftertaste with hints of herbs and flowers.
5. Has a quality certificate… In which it is indicated where, when and by whom the honey was collected, the results of organoleptic and chemical examination,. By the way, the higher the last indicator, the better – it means the amount of biologically active substances per unit of product. At the same time, there is honey, for example, acacia honey, which always has a low dioctase number, but this is not a reason to refuse it.
The most common ways to counterfeit honey are:
* honey is bred by mixing expensive varieties with cheap ones
* cheap varieties of flower honey are passed off as more expensive – lime, buckwheat, chestnut
* reduce “age”: they sell old crystallized honey, which is converted into a liquid state with the help of heating, for collected this year