We are notwithstanding months abroad from the 2014 honey harvest and in that location are a few bottleswarped_beeline of dear left from 2013…but they have all started to crystallize. Most people know that y'all can re-liquify crystallized honey with warm water. I figured if warm h2o works, hot water will work better.  I boiled a kettle of water and then I placed a bottle of love into a bowl with the hot water. The bottle, made of plastic, became… more plastic. It morphed from a classic beeline shape into a shorter baggy round blob (see picture of bottles shown on border). I can't imagine that this improved the honey's taste. Don't do it.

This got me thinking. What is the best way to re-liquify beloved?  I did what most people do in a situation similar this – I went to the Cyberspace with questions. And I found a lot of really bad answers.

The first bad answer I plant was from none other than the National Love Board:

If your honey crystallizes, simply place the dearest jar in warm h2o and stir until the crystals dissolve. Or, identify the honey in a microwave-safe container with the lid off and microwave, stirring every 30 seconds, until the crystals deliquesce. Be conscientious not to boil or scorch the dearest.

If you have tried the first suggestion, you know that you'll need to reheat the warm water a dozen times or more because dearest has a depression thermal conductivity – that means that it takes a long time for the warmed to reach the center of the bottle of beloved.  If you lot Google Re-liquify crystallized honey, you lot can discover many stories from people that followed the advice of using microwave ovens.  Microwave ovens are notoriously uneven in their heating. Warning the reader to "be careful not to eddy or scorch the dearest" is like warning users of charcoal grills to be careful when calculation gasoline to poorly lit fires – don't exercise information technology.

In that location were other ideas for re-liquifying honey on the Net.  All but as bad:

  • Put the dear in the oven with the oven light on. I doubt if this actually works until one minute after somebody absentmindedly turns the oven on for a pizza. After five minutes, that aforementioned person discovers a viscous, smoking mistake.
  • Run the beloved through a dishwasher cycle in the top rack. This may work for many dishwashers merely mine heats the water to some temperature in a higher place 110 °F. That might exist OK if yous are using drinking glass bottles and don't heed darker, pasteurized honey.
  • Place the honey in a 110°F chicken egg incubator. This sounded like a great thought until I imagined bottles of beloved nestled with objects that recently emerged from a craven's bottom.
  • Grossest proposition: drop the dearest bottles into your hot tub. Only be sure to launder off the oily scum that volition coat the bottles from the perfumed, sweaty bodies of last weekend's pool party.

Not everything on the Internet is bogus yet. I plant a really clear explanation of honey crystallization from my friend Khalil Hamdan. Everything he writes is clear and logical.

If you don't know exactly what temperature you are heating the love then you take a chance destroying its benign backdrop.  Y'all might become rid of crystals but you can also end upward darkening the honey, changing the taste, and destroying the helpful enzymes in dearest. Why is that important? That topic will be covered in a futurity post.

So what is a practiced solution for preserving the raw nature of dearest when re-liquifying it?  Only like expert BBQ: keep the temperature low and heat it deadening (long).  There are several ways to exercise this:

  • Put your bottles in a yogurt maker. They hold the temperature at 112 °F.
  • My option is the hsous_videeated h2o bathroom of my Sous Vide cooker (see picture & Wikipedia).  I put my bottles (glass and plastic) into the Sous Vide programmed to 110°F and in a few hours they are clear as a bell and I know that the h2o never deviated more than a degree from 110°F.  You might cramp at spending $300 for a Sous Vide merely and then y'all would exist missing out on beef curt ribs cooked medium rare   (exactly 134°F) that cook in your mouth. Aye, you heard that right – pinkish notwithstanding the collagen of this tough slice of meat is transformed into velvety gelatin. Or a ribeye steak that is medium rare everywhere (not merely in the eye). You lot tin can fifty-fifty Pasteurize your own eggs.
  • If y'all take neither yogurt maker or sous vide h2o oven, you can put the bottles into warm water but use as large a pot as possible and await to change the water often and use a thermometer.
  • And perhaps yous are trying to sell honey that crystallizes speedily and demand to re-liquify more than a couple bottles. In that case, you need a real honey warmer. Here are three designs:
    • A Honey Heater for the Hobbyist Apiculturist
    • A Honey Bucket Heater
    • Re-use an old freezer to warm a lot of honey

What are your ideas for restoring dearest?