Jeff and I decided to take the jars of honey from my basement that had begun to crystalize and make them into creamed honey.
There's a specific way to make creamed honey developed by Dyce. If you just take crystallized honey and call it creamed, usually it's far from a true creamed honey. Honey that crystallizes on its own has large crystals, is solid and has crystals easily felt with the tongue. Creamed honey to be show quality must be smooth.
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An earlier post on this blog describes the Dyce method as taught to me by Keith and Roseanne Fielder. I did record this event today, though, because it was difficult and fun and we learned a lot.
Half of the jars we made were cooled by stirring in an ice water bath and half were cooled in the freezer, periodically taking the honey out and stirring it (periodically meaning about every 3 minutes). We'll see if there's any difference.
We didn't have great thermometers - made me want to buy one just for this process. I had one instant thermometer that measured down to 60 degrees, but our candy thermometers didn't go that low.
We also discovered that a generous 4 liters of honey makes 17 jars. Actually we added 2 nine ounce jars of creamed honey as seed. The conversion shows that 4 liters should make 15 jars, but we got 17 but the seed honey would account for the extra 2 jars.
We wished for really good rubber spatulas, better thermometers and a better method of having an ice bath for cooling. There's always so much to learn...at least in the world of beekeeping!
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