Corn and yoghurt pancake with butter and bee pollen honey from Østermarie on Bornholm in Denmark.
A batch of ginger beer, made from my ginger bug, raw and pasteurised honeys, and a little live yoghurt whey. It seems to have formed a kind of SCOBY (yeast and various bacteria manifest as a layer of rubbery cellulose) and is pleasantly effervescent.
Really good with whisky :)
Elderflower mead
In the big tub, 3.5 litres of unsweetened elderflower infusion (three large handfuls trimmed flowers, steeped in boiling water for 12 hours). Next to it, and about to be whisked into it, are my two week old ginger bug, some raw ‘forest’ honey and a few grams of ground fermented bee pollen.
Rhubarb, to which i have added ten grams of salt, ten grams of honey, five grams of fermented bee pollen and a toasted Indonesian long peppercorn. Not sure what I’m making. The bee pollen hopefully has a ton of lactic acid bacteria which may ferment the mixture
A project to use up trimmings of beeswax and other parts of a beehive frame sent to Nordic Food Lab by a Spanish beekeper. He removed it from the hive as part of a strategy in apiculture that can mitigate the impact of the Varroa mite, which some believe contributes to Colony Collapse Disorder. The butter is sweet from the honey, both bitter and sour from the fermented pollen, and has the aroma of beeswax, made unmistakeable by a month of eating food infused with it. I seasoned it with about 0.5% salt. I made two batches, of which the other I brought to London from Copenhagen and have frozen. Based on this one, and the extra ageing, I can’t imagine what the new one will taste like, but will almost certainly be trying it on some pancakes.
An attempt to drain chunks of beeswax of the cream they have been infusing in for the last 36 hours, using the suction created by a chamber vacuum. First the pressure in the chamber drops and the cream boils at near 0 degrees celsius, de-aerating it. Then the pressure returns, dramatically altering the bubbling brew of honey, wax, cream and pollen, and dragging a little of the cream from the chambers of the beeswax
A frame from a Spanish beehive, containing honeycomb, fermented pollen and brood drone. For an eloquent expression of why we have it, see the blog post written by Josh Evans, researcher at Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen
A Danish honeycomb and in the second picture, pollen fermented by the bees that lived inside it. Very hard to procure (given to the Nordic Food Lab by a beekeeper) and without much known about it, it is one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten. It has a complex taste which, as you eat it, transforms from sweetness to bitterness to the sour tang of lactic fermentation, and it’s texture is somehow sticky, moist, powdery and dry all at the same time, with a pleasant resistance. Totally compelling