Hi, I'm Maria Noel Groves, author of Body Into Balance and Grow Your Own Herbal
Remedies and herbalist at Wintergreen Botanicals in New Hampshire. Today we're
here with Mountain Rose Herbs and we're gonna make an herb-infused honey, and
there are a couple different ways that you can make herb-infused honey. One is a
raw method which is very similar to making a tincture or a basic maceration
technique of an herbal oil, where you pretty much just put your herb in a jar
you cover it with honey. You can't shake it because honey doesn't exactly shake but
you would just every day or so you just turn it over and kind of keep
doing that for about two weeks or so and then strain out your honey after gently
warming it up. But we're gonna do a different technique that involves heat.
There's a little bit of controversy around heat and honey certainly you do
lose some of the properties, some of the healing properties of honey, when you
heat it but in this case we're not really using honey itself for the
healing properties, we're using it just because it's yummy and sweet and we're
gonna be using the heat to extract the medicinal properties of the plant. And so
some of the perks of this method over the raw method: one is that it's done in
about one day or even within a couple hours so you have it in a much shorter
span of time. Two, you do a really nice job extracting healing properties out of the
plants with that little bit of heat over the course of a few hours or so. And then
three, it is a little bit less apt to go bad because we're not introducing a lot
of microbes and even if we're working with fresh plant material you'll
evaporate off a lot of the moisture of that fresh plant, whereas if you make a
raw honey with fresh plant material, you can do it, but, they're really likely to
go bad; they'll ferment over time which could make something more like mead but
you're not controlling the fermentation process so it could end up actually
growing mold or other more unpleasant things. So this technique is one that I
learned from herbalist Michael Moore when I went to school at Southwest
School of Botanical Medicine, and my very first herbal honey I ever made was with
one of my favorite herbs, bee balm, which is a lot like oregano and thyme; kind of
like a cross between those two medicinally, and I just did it like on a
cook stove in the back of my trunk in the middle of the woods which was
pretty awesome. But now I do it in a home cooking environment it's a little bit
easier to do. So we are gonna do this with a dry plant today, we're gonna do it
with lavender, and this method works really well with aromatic
and so I'll do it with things like lavender, you can certainly do it with
ginger, fresh or dry. You can do it with bee balm, oregano, thyme, Korean licorice,
mint, anise, hyssop, these are all herbs that I love to do via this method, fresh
or dry. They taste so good you can make them in herbal recipes and you can also
attain some of the healing properties of the plants when you take them. It's not
as medicinally potent as making a tincture or a tea, honey is not really
that great of a solvent but it's yummy, it's sweet, it can be very soothing on
the throat, and so it's just really more of an enjoyable remedy that has a little
bit of healing properties of the plants at the same time. So I'm just gonna
measure out a little bit. You want about 1/4 or so of a part for your plant
material and about 2 parts for your herbs. So if you have like a 1/4 cup to a
half cup of herb and then 2 cups of honey would be about right, but really I
almost never really measure. It's more about putting the herbs in the pot and
then covering it with honey and that will work out just fine. But if you want
a recipe you could say, one part to four parts, or you can do a half cup of herb
material to 2 cups of honey. So I'm just gonna eyeball this. We're gonna do about
a quarter, or so a fifth or so of what's in here. And then we'll put that in our
pot. I'm not going to turn the pot on yet because we're not trying to fry our
herbs or toast our herbs, we're gonna cover it with honey. Honey is so slow
it's a good practice of patience getting it out. And you really want to
try to avoid wasting honey as much as possible because it takes, in a bee's
life it only made it about 1/4 or 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in their lifespan.
So I really try to treat this very respectfully and try not to waste it and
so I'll show you later on as we go to strain about some ways to preserve so
that we don't waste the honey that ends up on the sides of the jar. You can make
some yummy sweet teas out of that. So you could just kind of sit here and wait for
it to all come out I think this is fine for now I'll use this little bit of
honey for something else later on as it collects. Also another thing to keep in
mind about honey is the wait and volume is a little bit
different so if you had a cup of or 8 ounces of water it would be about 8
ounces by volume and about 8 ounces by weight. In the case of honey it's
actually a lot heavier than it takes up in volume and honey is usually sold by
weight so if you have a 32 ounce jar of honey by how its labeled, it's not
actually a quart in volume it's a little less than that, it's closer to about 20
ounces. So if you were doing this method you're like oh you know I've got making
wedding favors and I want to fill two hundred 1oz ounce jars with honey and you go to make
your recipe and you did it with measuring by the weight of it, you would
actually end up quite a bit short, like 1/3 short of what you're aiming for, and
that's not even accounting for what ends up kind of left on the side of the jar
that just never quite comes out. So that's just something to keep in mind
that you can kind of fudge it and throw a little bit more in, or actually do the
calculations. So for about 30 ounces of honey by weight you'll end up with about
20 ounces of honey by volume. And then keep in mind that you will lose some of
that on the sides of jars that you can regain by making tea with it but it
probably isn't going to end up in your finished product. That only really
matters if you're trying to make a set amount of jars of a set size, but if you
are doing that that's something to keep in mind. So we're gonna bring this up to
temp and we have to be really careful that we don't overheat our honey. Honey
has a way of boiling over really easily and when it does it really does ruin it.
Like I mentioned earlier there's a little bit of controversy over
whether or not it's okay to heat honey. There are some concerns that it may even
form some toxic compounds. I'm not particularly concerned about that but it
is on par with like heating any other sugary substance, where it's not really
quite as healthy once you've done that. But if you let it boil over it actually
burns the honey, and then it just doesn't taste good, it doesn't look good, it's not
as nice so we want to be careful that we don't do that. So I'm just gonna
kind of stir this up carefully, and of course at first things just don't really
mix in you see that the herbs kind of more sitting on top of the honey then
really totally covered by it, but as we stir it and it gradually comes up to
temp then it will get a little bit more liquidy. And so we've got these big
clumps right there. And we will just kind of keep going with
that and you're gonna want to keep an eye on it, let it come to where it seems
like it's almost about to boil and then shut it off and just keep repeating that.
Honey boils at a pretty low temperature it's definitely below 200, it varies a
little bit depending upon the honey itself, because honey is not a totally
exact substance from you know one batch to another. But it boils at a pretty low
temperature and so most of our cooking equipment gets hotter than that. If you
have a yogurt maker those usually set at around like 95 to 100 degrees, and that
is below honey's boiling temperature, so you could easily do this method in that
kind of a setting, or you could put it in a jar and put it in your car for a
little while, because your car on a warm sunny day it's probably right about 100
degrees. You'll want to put it in a bag or something so you don't leak
stickiness everywhere. So there are a lot of ways that you could play around with
this, but if you're using a heating unit like this or a crock-pot then you just
have to keep turning it on and off and being really mindful that it doesn't
boil over. So, we'll let that kind of do its thing for a little bit it's getting
a little softer. So we're getting just about ready to take this off the temp
and this is about what it's gonna look like at that stage. You'll start to see
almost like really tiny bubbles throughout it but it's not actually
really actively boiling much yet. And that's about where you want to take it
off the heat, let it cool down, and then just do this repeatedly a couple times
throughout the day. And you can easily do this when you're, you know, doing other
things in the kitchen as long as you can keep an eye on it. But maybe at breakfast
time you put it on for a little bit, remove it from heat. You can leave it
uncovered so especially for fresh plant material it gives a chance for that
moisture to evaporate. But, if let's say, it's cooled down and you're going off to
work for the day, you just put a lid on it so you know no little bugs or things
get into it while you're gone. And then at night come back, heat it up again, and
then on the very last heating is when we're gonna strain that out. But we're
not quite ready to do that yet. We're gonna let it cool and then we'll heat it
up at least one more time for this video today, but you can do it repeatedly a
couple times. For something really aromatic, heating it up just a little bit
a few times is great. If it's something that is tougher like maybe cinnamon
sticks, you could do it over the course of a couple days and that time,
even as it sitting in the cold honey, that time is gonna give a little more
chance to pull those flavors out. But for something really quick and aromatic like
holy basil or lavender, you can easily make a beautiful delicious herbal honey
in just a couple hours. So I think we're just about ready to go. We've reheated it a
little bit more and it's got a nice strong flavor so we're just gonna remove
that from the heat, it's important to do this step while it's still really warm
because it's gonna be a lot easier to strain at that stage. And we're just
going to take this strainer here and carefully strain it through and try to
get as much honey as possible separate from the
lavender.
And if you happen to have it, having a bigger strainer is really
helpful for this but this just happens to be the biggest one that I have to
work with right now.
We'll give that time to work its way through. So I'd say we're
just about good for the moment and we only have a little bit of honey out of
this batch because we did a pretty small batch but we do have a lot of honey just
kind of left on our pot and our strainer that, you know we just hate to waste that.
And so here's a way that you can use that up and make something really
delicious in the process, and it also is gonna help you with your cleaning
process. So just cover all that up with some water and you're basically going to
make a tea, a nice sweet tea.
And we'll heat that up so it's nice and hot and
then we'll strain it out and then you can enjoy that as a sweet tea, and then
you can also make iced teas with it. If you're doing any fermentation projects
you might be able to incorporate this into that as well. But mostly we're using
it as like a iced tea or a sweet tea and you can just play around it and have a
lot of fun you can make nice cocktails with it.
But it does only keep for maybe a couple days tops in the refrigerator, so it's
something you're going to want to drink pretty quickly. So now that we have a
really nice tea here gonna strain it out and then you can
enjoy that as a beverage. So we're gonna strain it out the same way that we
strained out the herbal honey.
But now all that really nice lovely honey, all
the hard work of those bees, we're gonna get to enjoy and we're not going to be
wasting. And then we can just compost whatever is left of the herb material.
Mmmm. This would be really nice on the skin as
well so. So that's how you make an herb-infused honey, a couple different methods.
I hope you enjoy it and happy herbal adventures.