New to me product: Creamed Honey

But, Howie, that ice age was 18,000 years ago. The dating isn't yet precise enough to be sure, but if the 40,000 to 60,000 year ago arrival date is correct, they would have had to come by water, over the Timor Sea, at least 40 miles.

I'm way out of my depth here -- Bill Bryson tried to make sense of this story in his book on Australia, and concluded that based on what was known a few years ago, they came by sea -- and at a time when boats weren't known elsewhere. He writes:

At some undetermined point in the great immensity of its past -- perhaps 45,000 years ago, perhaps 60,000, but certainly before there were modern humans in the Americas or Europe -- it was quietly invaded by a deeply inscrutable people, the Aborigines, who have no clearly evident racial or linguistic kinship to their neighbors in the region, and whose presence in Australia can only be explained by positing that they invented and mastered ocean going craft at least 30,000 years in advance of anyone else, in order to undertake an exodus, then forgot or abandoned nearly all that they had learned and scarcely ever bothered with the open sea again.

It is an accomplishment so singular and extraordinary, so uncomfortable with scrutiny, that most histories breeze over it in a paragraph or two, then move on to the second, more explicable invasion -- the one that begins with the arrival of Captain James Cook and his doughty little ship MHS Endeavour in Botany Bay in 1770. ...

In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson, pages 4 and 5.

Regards, Bob

You're right, Bob, fascinating stuff.

Even more fascinating when you add in the whole mass exchange of peoples and migrations and colonization by the Pacific islander cultures in betwixt the aboriginal and Captain Cook eras.

And of course, we have to factor in the whole South American/Thor Heyerdahl school of theories about Pacific expansion.


Suffice to say, though, that the maritime dispersion of cultures in the Pacific is, while murky at best, utterly intriguing and a testament to man's unquenchable striving to expand his world.

Wow, talk about thread drift. This is getting more like continental drift.
Here's an interestng link: Wisconsin Glaciation

Howie, you may have perked up the interest of both Bob (an old farmboy from Wisconsin) and myself, with that link.

When I was in school in the UW system (UWM actually) I first got interested in, then fascinated by, Geology. And a good part of that fascination was from being right smack dab in the middle of that part of glaciation history, with the all too visible reminders of how the glaciation affected the terrain, and therefore eventually effected the human society that came to reside there.

The Kettle Moraine area, now maintained as a park, is a place of astonishing beauty, and an easily accesible source for walking/hiking tours of glacial features. And I can still recall my sheer delight at walking up a rise to look down on a plain coverd by drumlins, and realizing the forces that combined to shape that terrain.

The best laboratory is nature.

And bringing this back around to wine (How can he do that, one might ask?), when I was in a wine conference in Oregon last year, I attended a riveting seminar by a scientist/viticulturalist who is engaged in mapping the various and sundry substrata of soils and major terrain features of the entire Willamette Valley area, down to a few yards, to display how the ages have created the current soil structures, and how that applies specifically to viticulture and enology. When you are sitting and sipping Oregon Pinot Noir while listening to the effect of the Great Basaltic Flow coinciding with the tectonic plate shift in the Chehalem region, you get a whole different appreciation of what terroir means.

Or "bee drift", Howie -- when bees go into the wrong hives. Fascinating subject on many levels -- why it happens -- immature bees, hives too close together, hives in straight lines, etc. -- and why the invaded hives don't kill the drifters -- all intriguing questions for bee keepers.

Or at least they were 40 years ago when I was really up on my bee keeping.

Regards, Bob

On the creamed honey issue...I mentioned to Cynthia that I'd had a similar epiphany recently with maple butter - new to me product over this side of the world. Apparently it's maple syrup whipped into a solid form. Very Laura Ingalls Wilder ...

Cynth, I haven't been able to stop thinking about english muffins since I read your post, so had to make some today. Nice sourdough ones, though novelty wears off after you've eaten eight of them.. :)

Celia

Nice sourdough ones, though novelty wears off after you've eaten eight of them..

You're my kind of woman, Celia!

[Jenise]

I've creamed honey many times, but never with raspberries. Sounds great.

How's the snow there? We're pretty much snowed in again in Albuquerque. No meetings. No work. Yay!

How do you cream honey? Is it more than whipping it to opacity? Ignore this question if it's already been asked--I'm not through reading the entire thread yet.

I must not have had my coffee yet when I posted that. I left out the word "had," as in "I've had creamed honey...."

But I do wonder if using a stick blender and the aerator disc would cream honey.

Larry, be sure you don't aerate if you make creamed honey. There's a complete description of the process in an earlier post -- a Cornell professor came up with a patent for a process that is very reliable.

Here's a simpler version, which may or may not give good results; when we did it years ago, we were very careful to control temperatures and this recipe doesn't seem to consider that very important:

Making creamed honey is easier than many people think. Before we explain how to make creamed honey, it is important to understand what it actually is and what it is not. Creamed honey is not whipped honey. There shouldn’t be any air in your creamed honey. Creamed honey is controlled granulation of honey which results in extremely small sugar crystals. The smaller the crystals the better the creamed honey. A good creamed honey should be smooth, not grainy, like velvet on the tongue.

Here are the basic steps to making creamed honey. The first rule of making creamed honey is to have a good starter. A starter is simply creamed honey that is added to the liquid honey and serves as a template for the granulation. Your final product will only be as good as what you start with, so start with a creamed honey you like. To begin, the liquid honey should be void of any prior granulation. It can be either freshly extracted or warmed slightly to be sure it is completely liquified. With the honey at room temperature, blend in the starter at a ratio of about 10 parts liquid honey to 1 part starter. Throughly mix until the starter is evenly distributed, but take care not to mix in air. Let this set overnight to allow any small amounts of air to rise to the surface. The following day bottle into containers of your choosing; however, a wide month container is preferred so the creamed honey can be scooped out easily. Once the mixture is in your containers, store in a cool place, ideally 57° F., until the honey has creamed. If it is too warm the honey will not cream properly. I have made some at home in my unheated garage in the fall when the temperature ranges from 45°-65° and had very good success.

That's it in a nutshell. Of course, the process can be more complicated, but a quality product can be produced by following the above steps. One last thing, be sure to save 1 or 2 containers to use as the starter for your next batch.


http://www.betterbee.com/resources/creamedhoney.html

I stand corrected. But it's sort of like the chicken and the egg conundrum. You need some creamed honey before you can make creamed honey. Hmmm.

There's a way of milling crystallized honey -- the big crystals that form naturally -- but my memory is that the process is tricky and unreliable. We bought starter creamed honey, and then built on what we had already made.

You can make about ten pints from a pint of creamed and nine pints of pasteurized honey -- yield is a little less because the creamed honey is thicker than the pasteurized honey.

Another complication: honeys from different flowers cream differently [or may not cream at all]. It's been a long time since I've done creaming -- I remember it as hard work. Messy, anyway.

It's so much easier to buy it already creamed -- the price isn't much different in our area for creamed and regular honeys.

You need some creamed honey before you can make creamed honey. Hmmm.

I look at it like sourdough starter.

"I look at it like sourdough starter."

Or sweet corn.

I look at it like sourdough starter

Actually, it sounds similar to the process used to temper chocolate, where you need to add a piece of in-temper chocolate to melted chocolate to "teach" the crystals to set in a certain way.

Which came first?

1. The chicken or egg?
2. Creamed honey or honey?
3. Sourdough bread or sourdough starter?
4. Chocolate or tempered chocolate?

When will it ever end!!!?

Hmmm ... well here's a shot at it, Larry.

1. The egg, if you buy the theory of evolution. Prior to the first true chicken zygote, there were only non-chickens. The zygote cell is the only place where DNA mutations could produce a new animal, and the zygote cell is housed in the chicken's egg. So, the egg must have come first.

I'm not religious, but Genesis has the chicken first: "Then God said, "Let the water teem with an abundance of living creatures, and on the earth let birds fly beneath the dome of the sky." And so it happened:"

2. Honey. Unless you pasteurize honey, it is very tough to cream honey. Otherwise, honey will crystallize into very big crystals -- I can't think of a mechanism that would create small crystals naturally -- failure of imagination, probably.

I'm not a baker or a candy maker, so don't have an opinion on those issues.

Here are my thoughts, Bob..

3. Sourdough bread, I think. Because the first leavened bread would have resulted from a chance discovery that flour and water left as a dough rose as a result of wild yeasts in the air. It would have taken some time to realise that keeping a piece of the dough back for future baking could achieve the same result in a controlled manner - hence the idea of a "starter".

4. Chocolate. It's possible to temper chocolate simply by bringing it to the correct temperature and working it within a given range. Tempering by adding already tempered chocolate is a known as seeding, and is an easier method of achieving the same result.

You win a salute from me with the egg question. That's my answer, too. And it's correct.

As far as Genesis goes, it depends upon which one, I or II?

Doesn't Genesis 2:019 give the same answer, Larry?

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

Incidentally, I forgot to legend my posts properly, sorry.

This post contains material on
evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a
fact, regarding the origin of living
things. This material should be
approached with an open mind,
studied carefully, and critically
considered.

This post discusses gods. The
existence of entities with supernatural
powers is controversial, and many
believe that myths, especially other
people's myths, are fictional. This
material should be approached with
an open mind, studied carefully, and
critically considered.

You probably don't need to cite to the original authors of these warnings, but the first is the actual text of a warning once used on textbooks by the Cobb County School District ("A community with a passion for learning") in Georgia, which actually plagiarized Alabama's evolution disclaimer.

You can find the history of the warnings at this Swarthmore College site.

Doesn't Genesis 2:019 give the same answer, Larry?

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

I was referring to the inconsistency of the time sequence. Genesis I says fowl are created before man and woman; Genesis II says fowl are created after man and before woman.

Incidentally, I forgot to legend my posts properly, sorry.

This post contains material on
evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a
fact, regarding the origin of living
things. This material should be
approached with an open mind,
studied carefully, and critically
considered.

This post discusses gods. The
existence of entities with supernatural
powers is controversial, and many
believe that myths, especially other
people's myths, are fictional. This
material should be approached with
an open mind, studied carefully, and
critically considered.

You probably don't need to cite to the original authors of these warnings, but the first is the actual text of a warning once used on textbooks by the Cobb County School District ("A community with a passion for learning") in Georgia, which actually plagiarized Alabama's evolution disclaimer.

You can find the history of the warnings at this Swarthmore College site.

I'm familiar with such warnings. I used to be the editor of CESE (Coalition of Excellence in Science and Education), which fights the introduction of creationism in public schools.

Besides, everyone except heathens and infidels knows the only true creation story is found in the Mayan Popol Vuh, which tells of four gods observing earth from the heavens. One god cuts the fingers off his left hand; they fall to earth and create mankind.

Oh, what a great debate that is Larry. The inconsistencies between the two versions gave me great scope in Sunday School, many years ago.

I still wonder [and admire] the patience of our pastor, a so-called Black Baptist from Pennsylvania with a community congregation made up of a number of different Protestant sects, most of them of a mild persuasion.