Infuse Your Honey With These Delicious Flavours

If you’ve been following our blog for the last few months, you know all the wonderful, creative uses for honey from body scrubs to homemade marshmallows. Today, we’d like to share with you how you can customize the flavour of raw honey to make it more personal and delicious (if that’s even possible). Infusing honey with different spices and herbs will add a little zest and excitement to your honey for a unique treat.

Infusing raw honey is so simple and easy you almost don’t need a recipe. Just add dried herbs to a jar, fill it with honey, and let it steep for 6-8 days. The longer you let it steep, the more intense the flavour will be. Then, just strain your honey into a different jar to remove the herbs and dig in!

Here are some great ideas to get you started, but the flavours you can create are only limited by your imagination! To begin, you will need:

• Three Foragers raw honey. The original raw honey will work better than the creamed honey for this purpose.

• 2 clean mason jars. One for steeping, and the other for storing your infused honey.

• 1 mesh strainer.

• Dried herbs or spices. Use dried spices to avoid introducing moisture into the honey and preserve its shelf life.

Lavender Infused Honey

For lavender honey, you will need food-grade dried lavender. Place a minimum of 3 tablespoons of lavender at the bottom of one of your mason jars. Add in your raw honey and mix the ingredients with a spoon or a chopstick.

Let the concoction sit for at least 5 days, or longer for a more intense flavour. Flip the jar once per day to agitate the lavender. Some herbs will settle on the bottom of the jar and others will rise to the top, so it’s important to continually flip the jar during the steeping process. Once you are happy with the strength of your newly infused honey, strain the honey into the other mason jar and enjoy!

Experience the calming effects of lavender by adding this honey to tea, or spreading it on toast. Mmm.

Spicy Honey

To give your honey some heat, add 2 or more whole dried chiles and let it steep. Remember to flip the jar every day and then remove the chiles. Alternatively, you can cut up the chile peppers before adding them to the honey and then use a strainer after a week to remove them. This will result in a more intense flavour.

Try drizzling some of your hot honey over barbeque chicken, pork, or shrimp. It also tastes great paired with cheese.

Vanilla honey

Our mouths are watering just thinking of this one. Scrape the beans of two vanilla pods into a jar, and then add the pods in too. Pour your honey overtop and that’s it! You won’t need to strain this one—just start enjoying it right away.

We recommend topping your ice cream with vanilla honey for a truly decadent treat.

There are so many other ways to infuse raw honey. Try adding ginger, cinnamon, thyme, rosemary, and you can even make combinations. Spicy ginger honey anyone? Lemon ginger, hot chilli, and mulled spice are some of our personal favourites. Experiment and let us know what your favourite kind of infused honey is in the comment section below or on Facebook. For those not looking to make their own homemade concoctions, keep your eyes peeled on the shelves of your local grocery store. ;)

Extra Tip!

If you find your raw honey is hard to pour due to crystallization, add your jar to some warm water. Try and keep the temperature under 37°C to prevent any pasteurization.