Banksia honey

Flavour and aroma

Aroma

malt, burnt caramel, salt marsh, damp sand

Flavour

treacle, a saline mineral note, roasted depth, faint bitterness

Finish

Long, savoury and drying.

Intensity

Pronounced

Sweetness

Moderately sweet

Bitterness

Trace

Acidity

Low

Colour, texture and crystallisation

Colour

Amber (85-114 mm Pfund)toDark amber (over 114 mm Pfund)

Deep amber to dark brown, occasionally with a greenish cast.

On setting: Sets to a dark medium grain.

Texture

Thick but pourable; Runny; Soft set

Crystallisation

Moderate — granulates over a few months

Granulates over a few months to a medium grain.

Typical composition

Moisture

15–19% (typically 17%)

Fructose

36–42% (typically 39%)

Glucose

30–36% (typically 33%)

Glucose-to-fructose ratio

0.76–0.94 (typically 0.85)

pH

3.9–4.8 (typically 4.3)

Electrical conductivity

0.5–1.2 mS/cm (typically 0.8 mS/cm)

These are typical ranges assembled across published work, not measurements of a specific honey.

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

Where it comes from

Floral source

Banksia integrifolia, B. marginata, B. menziesii and others — around 170 species, most of them Western Australian, in the same family as macadamia, rewarewa and the South African proteas.

Origins

Coastal New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and the sandplains of Western Australia.

Origin pages

• Australia
• Western Australia
• New South Wales
• Victoria
• South Australia

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

Harvest

March to August (southern hemisphere)

Autumn and winter for the coastal species, which makes banksia one of the few substantial cool-season flows in Australia and unusually valuable for that reason.

The bees

Banksia flower spikes hold hundreds of individual flowers and produce nectar in extraordinary quantity — enough that honeyeaters, pygmy possums and honey possums feed on them, and the honey possum lives on almost nothing else. The introduced honey bee is a latecomer to a system built for vertebrates, and competition with native nectar-feeders for banksia is a live conservation question in Western Australia.

Usual processing

Spun (centrifugally extracted), Coarsely strained, Raw

Banksia woodland and sandplain heath have been cleared extensively around Perth and along the eastern seaboard, and several banksia species are also being killed at scale by the introduced root pathogen Phytophthora cinnamomi. The honey's supply constraint is habitat and disease rather than technique.

What to do with it

A savoury cooking honey. Its salt-and-malt character belongs in glazes and beside strong cheese rather than in tea.

With cheeseGlazing and roastingMarinadesBakingAt the tableSpreading

Pairings

• Blue and washed-rind cheesesClassic

  Salt and funk on both sides, and the honey does not have to pretend to be sweet.

• Barbecued and smoked meat

  The malt and saline depth read as an ingredient rather than as sweetening.

• Dark rye bread

  Both assertive and neither delicate.