Plum blossom honey

Flavour and aroma

Aroma

plum blossom, marzipan, light honeysuckle

Flavour

marzipan, stewed plum, clean sugar

Finish

Short and soft.

Intensity

Mild

Sweetness

Sweet

Bitterness

None

Acidity

Moderate

Colour, texture and crystallisation

Colour

Extra white (8-17 mm Pfund)toWhite (17-34 mm Pfund)toExtra light amber (34-50 mm Pfund)

Pale straw, occasionally with a faint pink cast.

On setting: Sets creamy white.

Texture

Runny; Soft set; Creamed

Crystallisation

Fast — granulates within weeks

Glucose-leaning like all the spring stone-fruit honeys, and quick to granulate.

Typical composition

Moisture

16–19% (typically 17.5%)

Glucose-to-fructose ratio

1–1.2 (typically 1.1)

pH

3.6–4.2 (typically 3.9)

These are typical ranges assembled across published work, not measurements of a specific honey. Follows the spring Prunus honeys generally. Monofloral samples are rarely separated in published work.

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

Where it comes from

Floral source

Prunus domestica and its relatives. Plum flowers earlier than apple and slightly later than blackthorn, so a genuine monofloral needs a district where plum dominates.

Origins

The plum belts of Serbia, Hungary, Romania, Poland and Germany, where plum is a major orchard crop.

Origin pages

• Europe
• Hungary
• Germany
• Poland
• Romania
• Serbia
• The Balkans

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

Harvest

March to April (northern hemisphere)

Early and short, and vulnerable to frost in exactly the way the fruit crop is.

The bees

Plum sets a substantially better crop where mason bees are present, because Osmia flies at temperatures that keep honey bees clustered — and a central European March supplies plenty of those.

Usual processing

Spun (centrifugally extracted), Coarsely strained, Creamed (seeded and controlled-set)

Almost always an orchard blossom honey rather than a strict monofloral, because plum, cherry and dandelion overlap in the same weeks.

What to do with it

A breakfast and dessert honey. Its aromatics do not survive cooking, so use it cold or off the heat.

At the tableSpreadingDessertsIn hot drinks

Pairings

• Plum tart

  Blossom honey over the fruit of the same tree, which is one of the few cases where the echo is genuinely there.

• Fresh curd cheese

  Delicate against delicate, with the honey supplying the aroma.

• Yoghurt

  Acidity in the yoghurt gives the honey's sweetness something to balance, and the fat carries the blossom note.

History and traditional use

The Balkan and Hungarian plum orchards that produce this honey exist for slivovitz and for lekvar, and the honey is entirely incidental to both.

• Eaten with the fresh curd cheeses of central Europe, and used in the plum-heavy baking of the same region.

Traditional use records that people have done something, and for how long. It is not evidence that it works.