I'm in my kitchen about to make some lemon/chocolate hab tea (because it sounds good in my head lol). I pulled the pail of raw honey out of the cupboard, and suddenly wondered if it would be good infused with certain peppers? This honey comes from a local farm and they sell jars infused with all kinds of stuff like cinnamon, mint, and lemon. They are always at the farmers market and I thought about asking them if they would consider cooking up a pepper infused honey. The only trouble is I can't decide what would taste best, and if they would need to dry the peppers first. What are your thoughts on this? Which pepper would you think would taste best?
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Anyone ever infuse honey with peppers?
- Thread starter shaggs2riches
- Start date
I've had various.
Infusing honey with chilli is surprisingly difficult and what chilli is best will depend on the type of honey used. Just like chillies have subtle variations in flavour (and a few wild ones), the type of pollen that makes the honey does make quite a difference sometimes.
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Most honeys have some floral notes, though, so slightly floral chillies tend to pair quite well. I've never had a raw chocolate hab but, from my experience of sauce, they seem to have a richness and florality that might be a good fit.
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Most honeys have some floral notes, though, so slightly floral chillies tend to pair quite well. I've never had a raw chocolate hab but, from my experience of sauce, they seem to have a richness and florality that might be a good fit.
Cutting fresh peppers very finely would work best, dried will take a long time to rehydrate and infuse the flavor. The sweetness will cut the heat level by allot. With the fresh peppers the honey will become thinner as it integrates the pepper moisture.
My 2 cents
My 2 cents
salsalady
Business Member
I've never tried it, but I think you could use dried peppers and gently heat the honey for an hour or two. Put the dried pepper in a ss tea ball or cheese cloth if you dont want flakes and seeds in the end product.
Give it a go with a cup or two. Take pics and let us know how it goes.
Give it a go with a cup or two. Take pics and let us know how it goes.
i don't see any on his site now, but PEX has had some scorpion infused honey before. you could try contacting him ?
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https://www.pexpeppers.com/product-category/honey/
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he used to be here @ THP but isn't around anymore, or hasn't been for a while anyway.
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https://www.pexpeppers.com/product-category/honey/
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he used to be here @ THP but isn't around anymore, or hasn't been for a while anyway.
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I make various pepper wines, including meads. You can use fresh or dried, but I prefer to use fresh peppers. Flavoring honey is probably more trouble than it is worth, considering you could make a basic hot sauce much easier with the same peppers and just throw a few dabs of that into/onto whatever you're wanting the flavored honey for. That said, it doesn't take a ton of fresh peppers to properly spice a relatively large volume of alcohol or honey. You can flavor a 750 bottle of pepper wine or vodka with only 5 good sized fresh habanero, for example. Start small, with the peppers roughly chopped so you can remove all the chunks later. Deseed them first, if you can do so without harming or removing much of the placenta. You can leave the seeds in, but they might leach tannins into your final product and add bitterness. You can get a small, loose weave mesh bag from any homebrew shop for dryhopping (not cheesecloth, the looser mesh) and put your peppers in that to soak. Make sure to push them under the surface of your liquid at least 2 times a day to keep them wet and avoid rot. With a wine base, you can leave them in for a week. With a honey, you're going to have to find the happy place where you pull them out before fermentation starts.
Initially warming honey to 170 degrees will allow you to infuse or mix things with it much easier. Introducing your fruit/spices at this point and keeping that temperature for 5 minutes kills many of the bacteria and yeasts you're worried about (but not all). Taking it over 170 degrees will cause compounds within it to begin to break down. Overheating will lose you a ton of the flavor and complexity of the honey, itself. While initially heating your honey, you can skim off any foam and dump it into the sink or garbage. Those are impurities that the heating process has broken loose. Skimming isn't necessary, but produces a better final product from honey in the raw or straight from the apiary. With the filtered and abused crap on a wal-mart shelf, they've already stripped most of the impurities (along with a ton of the flavor).
The biggest problem I see with making a peppered honey is unintentional fermentation. Unless you ensure the chiles you use are clean/sterilized on the outside, you will undoubtedly be introducing bacteria and/or yeast to your honey. This isn't a problem when making mead, because you already have a brewing yeast culture that is dominant. In something you are not intending to ferment, the foreign yeast/bacteria will take hold unless you store your honey in a refrigerator. This type of fermentation generally won't produce delicious mead or otherwise usable product. As I said, flavoring honey with anything non-spice is in my opinion generally going to be more trouble than it is worth. People who do it commercially are probably using extracts and artificial flavorings, or they're heating their honey past the breaking point to fully sterilize it after infusion.
As to infusing honey with spices, go nuts. The baddies in most spices all seem to be prone to death at or below 170 degrees. Heat your honey to just under or at 170 in a kettle or saucepan on the stove, skim any impurities, stir in your spices & keep it near (but below!) 170 for 5 minutes, then pour the honey into whatever you're storing it in and jam that into an ice bath in the sink to get the temp down to the low 80s quickly. Done. Cheers.
EDIT: wtf did the site do to my paragraphs? lol
Initially warming honey to 170 degrees will allow you to infuse or mix things with it much easier. Introducing your fruit/spices at this point and keeping that temperature for 5 minutes kills many of the bacteria and yeasts you're worried about (but not all). Taking it over 170 degrees will cause compounds within it to begin to break down. Overheating will lose you a ton of the flavor and complexity of the honey, itself. While initially heating your honey, you can skim off any foam and dump it into the sink or garbage. Those are impurities that the heating process has broken loose. Skimming isn't necessary, but produces a better final product from honey in the raw or straight from the apiary. With the filtered and abused crap on a wal-mart shelf, they've already stripped most of the impurities (along with a ton of the flavor).
The biggest problem I see with making a peppered honey is unintentional fermentation. Unless you ensure the chiles you use are clean/sterilized on the outside, you will undoubtedly be introducing bacteria and/or yeast to your honey. This isn't a problem when making mead, because you already have a brewing yeast culture that is dominant. In something you are not intending to ferment, the foreign yeast/bacteria will take hold unless you store your honey in a refrigerator. This type of fermentation generally won't produce delicious mead or otherwise usable product. As I said, flavoring honey with anything non-spice is in my opinion generally going to be more trouble than it is worth. People who do it commercially are probably using extracts and artificial flavorings, or they're heating their honey past the breaking point to fully sterilize it after infusion.
As to infusing honey with spices, go nuts. The baddies in most spices all seem to be prone to death at or below 170 degrees. Heat your honey to just under or at 170 in a kettle or saucepan on the stove, skim any impurities, stir in your spices & keep it near (but below!) 170 for 5 minutes, then pour the honey into whatever you're storing it in and jam that into an ice bath in the sink to get the temp down to the low 80s quickly. Done. Cheers.
EDIT: wtf did the site do to my paragraphs? lol