Honey, Arizona

Raw Honey

Everyone knows honey tastes sweet. If you’re sampling a highly processed supermarket brand, sweetness may be the only flavor you’ll notice, because pasteurization and filtration eliminate many of the original flavor notes, along with much of honey’s health-boosting vitamins, minerals, amino acids and bee pollen. Raw honey, on the other hand, comes straight from the comb, with a minimum of straining—mainly to remove pieces of comb, wax and dead bees. It is richly layered with fruit, floral, grassy, earthy or citrusy notes, depending on the flowers the bees visited. The flavors in our raw Arizona honey will vary according not only to the pollen source, but also the time of harvest. Late season honey tends to be sweeter and darker than the early harvest.

Raw honey is also more texturally interesting than the generic supermarket brand. Bees increase the shelf life of their product by fanning their wings over the honeycombs to draw out moisture. This gentle dehydration process ensures that the honey remains a viable food source for hive residents throughout the winter months. Thus raw honey isn’t runny like the pasteurized stuff, especially if the latter has been stretched with water or corn syrup.

Because of the complexity of taste notes, raw honey pairs with a surprising array of foods. It’s not just for the breakfast table or the dessert tray, even if there’s no denying that honey whipped with softened butter makes an English muffin indescribably better or that baklava wouldn’t exist without a lot of hard-working bees. Mixed with mustard, vinegar, garlic and olive oil, honey jazzes up the most ho-hum salad dressing. And it improves the flavor and moistness of grilled meats, while also increasing the adherence of the barbecue sauce.

For wholesale buyers, we sell our raw honey in bulk, in gallon jugs.