Ailanthus honey

Flavour and aroma

Aroma

muscat grape, elderflower, cat, warm varnish

Flavour

muscat, candied grape, faint medicinal note, light caramel

Finish

Long, perfumed and faintly medicinal.

Intensity

Intense

Sweetness

Very sweet

Bitterness

Trace

Acidity

Moderate

Colour, texture and crystallisation

Colour

Light amber (50-85 mm Pfund)toAmber (85-114 mm Pfund)

Golden to warm amber, clear and bright.

On setting: Sets to a fine pale cream, losing some of its aromatic intensity.

Texture

Runny; Thick but pourable; Soft set

Crystallisation

Moderate — granulates over a few months

A balanced sugar ratio that sets over a few months. Italian producers usually sell it liquid and fresh, because the aroma is at its most striking then.

Typical composition

Moisture

15–18% (typically 16.5%)

Glucose-to-fructose ratio

0.85–1.05 (typically 0.95)

pH

3.7–4.3 (typically 4)

Electrical conductivity

0.2–0.5 mS/cm (typically 0.35 mS/cm)

These are typical ranges assembled across published work, not measurements of a specific honey. Ranges from Italian sensory and compositional work on ailanto honey, which is a recognised category there.

What these mean: the sugars and the ratio · moisture · conductivity · how each is measured

Where it comes from

Floral source

Ailanthus altissima, naturalised across southern and central Europe. The male trees smell strongly and unpleasantly at close range, which is exactly what advertises the flow.

Origins

Italy above all, where it is a recognised monofloral, and across the Balkans, Hungary and parts of Spain and France.

Origin pages

• Italy
• Europe

Resolved from both directions — origins this honey names, and origins that name it.

Harvest

June to July (northern hemisphere)

A short heavy flow in the hottest part of the summer, when many Mediterranean landscapes have nothing else.

The bees

Worked hard by honey bees for the fortnight it is open, and audible from below. In urban and post-industrial landscapes it can be the dominant summer forage.

Usual processing

Spun (centrifugally extracted), Coarsely strained, Filtered

Produced deliberately in Italy from naturalised stands, and increasingly from urban and industrial land where the tree dominates.

What to do with it

A tasting honey rather than a cooking one. Heat destroys precisely the aromatics that make it remarkable, and there is no point spending it on an oven.

At the tableDessertsWith cheeseDrizzling

Pairings

• Fresh ricottaClassic

  The cheese has almost no flavour of its own, which lets the honey's muscat aroma be the entire dish.

• Blue cheese

  Sweet and aromatic against salt and mould, with enough intensity to avoid being buried.

• Peaches

  The honey's muscat and the fruit's lactones are in the same aromatic register, which compounds rather than competes.

History and traditional use

Ailanthus was introduced to Europe in the eighteenth century as an ornamental and later planted to feed the ailanthus silkmoth in a failed attempt to break the mulberry silk monopoly. Both projects ended; the tree did not.