Fruity honeys

The fruity honeys

Why some match and others do not

A honey tastes of its nectar, not of its fruit. Where the two coincide it is because the compounds responsible are present in both, which happens more often than chance but far from always.

Avocado honey is the clearest counterexample. It is dark, thick and tastes of molasses, with nothing whatever of the fruit about it, and it surprises almost everyone who tries it expecting otherwise. Loquat honey goes the other way — the fruit is mild and the honey is a strong marzipan-and-caramel affair.

Using fruity honeys

• On plain yoghurt, where their acidity does real work.
• In dressings, where they supply sweetness and acid together.
• With fresh fruit, though matching like with like is not always the best idea — baobab honey on tropical fruit works, cranberry honey on cranberries does not.
• With fresh soft cheese, where the fruit note reads as a preserve.
• In cocktails, where acidity is generally welcome.

The acidic ones

Three honeys here are acidic enough to change how you use them. Lingonberry and cranberry are genuinely tart. The stingless bee honeys — kelulut, jataí and sugarbag — go considerably further, at a pH around 3.5, and function as souring agents in the kitchens of the regions that produce them. They are technically fruity honeys and they behave more like a fruit vinegar.

Where the fruit character actually comes from

A fruity honey is not honey with fruit in it, and the character does not arrive from the plant's fruit at all — the honey is made months before most of these plants fruit. What produces the impression of fruit is a set of aroma compounds, principally esters and aldehydes, that the human nose associates with particular fruits because they occur in those fruits too.

This is why the coincidences happen. Baobab nectar and baobab fruit share compounds that read as citrus sherbet, so the honey does genuinely taste related to the fruit. Persimmon works similarly. Avocado does not: its nectar produces molasses and dried-fruit notes with no relationship whatever to the flesh of the fruit, and every first-time taster is surprised by it.

The lesson generalises. A honey named for a plant tells you what the bees worked, not what the plant's other products taste like. Anyone buying a fruit-tree honey expecting a concentrated version of the fruit is going to be wrong about half the time, and knowing which half is most of what this page is for.