Honey is a product that is used for various purposes:
• When baking.
• Instead of sugar in drinks.
• As a component of cosmetics, such as scrubs, masks.
• For the treatment of colds.
• During massage.
Therefore, it is very important to know how to store honey at home so that it retains its beneficial qualities for a long time. Even if we are talking about a cafe, restaurant or spa, all these rules and tips do not lose their relevance.
Honey Storage: Product Selection
The purchase of honey by a private person is carried out without a thorough chemical analysis of the products offered. Therefore, it is important to be confident in the supplier. If the product is purchased not from the hands, but from the enterprise, the company must provide documentary evidence of the quality of the product. Recently, owners of large private apiaries also conduct laboratory analysis of products. This allows you to sell honey to enterprises exporting it to the EU countries.
The main problem of choosing and purchasing honey in a supermarket, taking into account its subsequent storage, is the lack of the ability to produce its full organoleptic analysis. It includes not only a visual inspection of the substance. It is necessary to make sure that there are no taste impurities and that the smell matches the established standard. The latter is important for varieties such as buckwheat, heather honey and many others.
Storage of honey: choose a container
Thinking about how to store honey at home, special attention should be paid to containers. Since time immemorial, wooden barrels and clay kriens have been used as containers. The former were used in situations where it was required to ensure long-term storage of honey at home, and the latter was used to preserve the product during daily use. Glass containers were not in use due to its higher cost. Now, on the contrary, a familiar bottle will cost much less than a small barrel.
Before packaging honey, the container must be disinfected and washed well, dried after that. The presence of liquid can cause the onset of fermentation. In addition to wooden, glass and clay containers, you can use plastic and metal containers. Both materials must be marked “for food”. They must also be heat treated and washed. The next point is the tightness of the package.
If honey initially has an acceptable percentage of water and the room in which the product will be stored does not have high air humidity, then there will be no fermentation process, even if we are talking about packing honey in a plastic container under an ordinary lid. The presence of direct sunlight can also damage this. Therefore, it is advisable to put honey in a dark place or use opaque containers. Additional protection can be used to provide protection from sunlight. You just need to put transparent containers in cardboard boxes.
Storage of honey: temperature
One of the features of honey storage is the need to maintain the temperature in the room where it stands at +5 to +20 degrees. If it is higher or lower, then the concentration of nutrients will begin to decrease. In no case should you freeze the product. If this happens, then carcinogens appear in it instead of useful compounds. This also applies to situations when it is heated to more than 45 degrees, it also destroys the nutrients in it. Therefore, it is never added to very hot tea, milk or coffee. It is necessary to wait until they cool down a bit or take a bite.
Honey storage: why did the product ferment?
There is a situation when the container for storing honey is chosen correctly, and the temperature regime is fully observed and visually it corresponded to the standard when purchased, but after a few months it fermented. Why did this process even begin? Here the fault in most cases lies with the manufacturer. The goods sold had a high level of humidity, more than 21%. The reason for this may be a banal addition of water to increase mass, or a violation of the process. In the latter case, the pumping of honey from the honeycombs was done earlier than the process of evaporation of moisture ended.
However, improper storage can lead to a similar result. This applies to situations when honey is stored in rooms with high humidity in containers with impaired tightness. A vivid example is a house standing on the shore of a large open reservoir. If there is no air dryer in it, then in any room there will be an increased level of humidity.
