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Crystalized Honey

janice__indiana5

10 years ago

What causes honey to crystalize? Can it be avoided? What do you do when it does crystalized? I usually buy a large container of honey from Sam's Club but, it usually crystalizes before I can use it all. I have heated it in the microwave, but this resulted in a distorted bottle, and probably not the smartest thing I've ever done.

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Comments (10)

John Liu
10 years ago
Place bottle in warm water instead.
grainlady_ks
10 years ago
For those of us who do home food storage, honey is one of those foods that has an "indefinite" shelf-life and due to it's composition (glucose and water - see the link below), it's nearly always crystalized when it's rotated from storage to the kitchen. I do like johnliu suggests, I sit the jar in a pan of hot water. I happen to have a warming burner on my electric range and that temperature is perfect for slowly liquefying crystalized honey. Microwaving it works, but not as well as the hot water bath.

Unprocessed RAW honey is naturally crystalized, but the crystals are tiny, and it is spreadable, more like peanut butter, if you want something a little different to use. It mixes nicely with butter or coconut oil for a nice spread or topping.

-Grainlady

Here is a link that might be useful: What Causes Honey to Crystalze
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janice__indiana5
Original Author
10 years ago
I placed the honey in a pan of water on the warming burner on the stove. It worked great! Thank You Grainlady!
anoriginal
10 years ago
Think honey is maybe the only food product that basically NEVER goes bad. I don't use a LOT of it, and will wait till it's on sale to buy... not cheap. I have one of those "diner" style, GLASS syrup containers. Will fill it and just put rest of bottle into a glass jar on pantry shelf for later. If stuff in kitchen or in pantry gets crystallized, I just put container in pan of barely simmering water and it comes back in no time. Beats deforming the plastic container... microwave can be hard to control.
annie1992
10 years ago
I buy large jars of local honey and they do sometimes crystallize before I use them. I try to decant into smaller glass jars because they are easier to handle, so I use pint canning jars.

When it crystallizes in one of them I just remove the lid and put it in the microwave because it's in the glass jar, but you need to be careful and not let it get too hot as it's like molten lava and you can get a heck of a burn. Don't ask me how I know that.....

Plastic bottles go into a hot water bath, as has been mentioned here. It takes longer but works well and is safer than molten honey for some of us!

Annie
sally2_gw
10 years ago
Just don't make the mistake of putting your plastic bottle of honey into boiling waterÃ¢ÂÂ¦another case of a distorted bottle. lol

I'm lucky enough to have a source of local honey, too, from just about a mile or two away from me. It may not be the cheapest honey, but I'm supporting a local business, and it's darn good honey.

Sally
dcarch7 d c f l a s h 7 @ y a h o o . c o m
10 years ago
Also make sure what you bought is real honey.

dcarch
linnea56 (zone 5b Chicago)
10 years ago
If it's not real honey, how can you tell? I have heard about imitation honey.
User
10 years ago
Here is a great pdf file on honey and why it crystalizes. Due to the amount of nectar and the kind of nectar my local honeyman has available to his bees , the honey I get from him has never crystalized even after a year. Other honey from other parts of the country have turned to crystals at different rates as the article states. You can safely add a tiny amount of water to the honey when you heat it and it won't re-crystalize. Think of it as you playing "nectar" and you are simply diluting what nature didn't do for you . c

Here is a link that might be useful: pdf on honey
annie1992
10 years ago
Thanks, trailrunner, that was very informative. I knew that our local alfalfa/clover honey and the honey from the fruit orchards would crystallize more quickly than some others, but I didn't realize that my cold house would also help it along. Since my thermostat stays at 55F all winter, my house is relatively cool and I buy bigger containers of honey as I use it for honey wheat bread on a regular basis. I just divide it up into smaller containers and then melt the crystals when I need to, but I may have to find a warmer spot and see if that helps a bit.

Sally, like you, I like to keep my business local when possible, plus I know when I get my honey from Big Prairie Farms or Larry Hasselman that it really IS honey, since the beekeeper is a neighbor.

Annie

Here is a link that might be useful: Hasselman Honey

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