Honey is undoubtedly a pleasant food, which is filled with nutrients and antioxidants. While honey is a natural product, which may be found liberally in nature, for the purchasers, it’s so difficult to find genuine quality honey that’s not adulterated but full of good enzymes and nutrients.
Truly Raw Honey, is a cold processed honey, non- adulterated and as the name reflects, it’s already a raw substance that is delivered to the honey lovers.
So what is cold processed honey after all?
Honey is obtained in the purest form first. This is presumably related to honey processed with no heating, often simply called raw honey, or possibly cold-extracted or cold-processed. It likely has more flavor and color preserved than commercially-processed honey which uses lots of heat. It’s not actually cold, the honey is just not heated.
Fresh unheated honey carries a vibrancy you don’t find in stores. A good way to describe the flavor is “alive”, leaving natural goodness in the honey. Raw honey is only strained before it’s bottled, which means it retains most of the beneficial nutrients and antioxidants that it naturally contains.
If cold processed honey is better, is the heated honey bad?
Commercial Honey is usually heated to 66°–77°C to decrease its viscosity before filtration. Some honey is pasteurized, which needs temperatures of 72°C or higher. The heating process also reduces the moisture content, delays crystallization, and destroys yeast cells, enhancing period of time. In addition, heating increases the brown color of the honey.
First, let’s assuage the foremost serious concern – no, heating honey won’t turn it toxic and kill you. Heating up raw honey will change the makeup of the honey, and potentially weaken or destroy enzymes, vitamins, minerals, etc (more on this in a very second) but it’ll not offer you a horrible disease or poison you. Keeping it near raw is great for your body, but heating it isn’t killing you.
Does the nutritional level dip ?
As for the nutritional benefits of honey – yes, heating the honey can damage them. It does depend on how much the honey is heated and for how long, however. For instance – can you heat honey to 95 degrees? We certainly hope so, since it can reach that temperature inside the beehive itself. Heating honey to around this temperature is just fine, and will leave the health benefits of the raw honey intact.
Honey should not be heated rapidly, over direct heat. Basically, the hotter you heat it, the more potential for reducing nutritional value.
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Heating up to 37°C (98.6 F) causes loss of nearly 200 components, part of which are antibacterial.
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Heating up to 40°C (104 F) destroys invertase, an important enzyme.
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Heating up to 50°C (122 F) for more than 48 hrs. turns the honey into caramel
Now that heating the honey can cause it showcase such effects,
Can Honey be good while cooking?
Cooking with honey may be a bit trickier. The prolonged exposure to very high temperatures within the oven or on the grill will most certainly degrade the beneficial enzymes and even the taste of your honey. Raw honey has many delicate and nuanced flavors that may be lost when exposed to a variety of heat. That doesn’t mean it won’t taste good or that you simply shouldn’t do it! It’s just a distinct application for the honey.
You want to keep it just about raw and eat it that way, if you’re looking to sizzle some sweetness and honey flavor to your dinner, you’ll be able to cook it all you want!
Truly Raw Honey
At Honey All Day, we understand the importance of consuming truly raw honey and that is why we came up with a solution. Instead of relying on the heat-processing technique that kills the essence of truly raw honey, we use a distinct cold-processing technique to reduce the moisture and keep the nutritional value of truly raw honey intact.
We store the honey in a vacuum chamber up to 30 degrees and with constant slow stirring reduce the moisture to 17-18%. This takes around 3-5 days but retains all the enzymes of the honey. Throughout the entire process, honey is not heated anywhere above 36 degrees (which is the natural temperature of the hive). We also strain the honey using a large mesh, which only filters things like body parts of Bees, Twigs, Leaves etc. Cold honey flows slowly so this takes a while. But once it is filtered, we check the moisture content. Once the moisture is reduced, honey can be stored for years and years without yeast getting activated and fermenting it. To retain the taste of truly raw honey, we store it at 15-18 degrees Celsius.
You know which honey you must rely on. Choose wisely!
Hint: Stay healthy and fine, with Truly Raw Honey by Honey All Day!
