How whipped honey is made often unique to each beekeeper. Spun honey is also known by a few names, such as whipped honey and creamed honey. These terms reflect the converting of raw honey, through a churning and chilling process, into a thick whipped honey. Set honey is a raw honey where time and nature have converted it to a crystallized honey.
Every jar of spun honey done at Ninja Honeybees is whipped, rested, whipped,chilled, and then packaged for sale. Before we spin the honey, we prepare the honey. This preparation task is designed to ensure the base honey is free from naturally occurring crystals. If you’ve seen crystallized honey in a store, you’ll see the varying stages of the honey granulating and the associated hardening process. Honey that sits on a store shelf and crystallize on their own are called “set honey”. Raw honey granulation naturally starts with the glucose crystallizing. Initially, crystals form and grow, starting out forming a grainy paste, moving to a textured sediment and finally maxing out into a hardened block.
Some Europeans favor the grainy paste texture of “Set” honeys. Most people, however, are not much interested in honey within the sediment phase and certainly not the solidifying brick block phase at the end of the crystallizing process.
Natural occurring honey crystals in set honey are larger and thicker than the crystals we create in our whipped honey. To achieve the delicate texture we’re after, we really must start either with: 1) a 100 percent decrystallized honey or 2) a “mature” honey that we decrystallize ourselves. You can’t cheat the steps, so you need to get the honey “runny” and crystal free before spinning. We never heat our honey because that would not preserve the vitamins and natural nutrients. If we fail to decrystallize the honey fully, we end up with “heterogenous” (meaning large and small) crystals hanging out together. When larger crystals hang out with smaller, more refined crystals, the larger crystals win and revert the honey to a set honey. For this reason, we keep the large crystallizes out of the equation, because they prevent us from reaching our texture objective.
To whip or spin the honey, we pour our honey into our mixing tank.. The starter honey is the previously whipped honey that seeds the new batch of raw honey. The finished product is our spun honey. We find 10% of starter and 90% raw honey works great. We continue this process until we reach our desired texture, consistency, and color. This process can take from two to five days. The final phase of the process is to chill the honey again in wine coolers or refrigerators than can stay steady at 59 degrees Fahrenheit. This year we are focusing on pure spun honey, without adding any fruits due to the high moisture content of our2020 honey.
Over time, the whipped honey may start reverting back to it’s earlier texture and de-assimilating the flavors and raw honeys, especially when exposed to heat. It is ok to store your whipped honeys in the refrigerator, but just don’t get it too cold (below 50 degrees) or it will harden. We recommend getting yourself a wine cooler and storing in there if at all possible. Caveat If you store whipped honey in a very cold fridge, this will lead you to doing unthinkable things like microwaving spun honey.
The process of making whipped honey was developed and patented by Elton J. Dyce in 1935, but he used to slightly heat the honey. Today, many elect not to heat in order to not reduce the natural healing benefits.
Stop by the Newton Market on Saturdays and pick up a jar of Ninja Honeybee Spun Honey. On September 19, we will be providing taste test to the first 70 customers.
