Buckwheat Honey Is Not for Everyone

Naomi Bossom

2022 | Adapted from No. 80

Buckwheat Honey is Not for Everyone
The Molasses of Honey

By Edward Behr

Buckwheat is not wheat or even a grass at all but a leafy annual bearing clusters of small, pretty white flowers. Where wheat prefers to ripen in warmth and dryness, buckwheat likes a relatively cool climate and steady moisture, and it’s ready for harvest in as little as eight weeks. The honey, generally considered the darkest honey of all, is sometimes nearly black. Not everyone likes the strong, distinctive taste, but enough people do that the honey often commands a premium. One of the rare buckwheat specialists in the United States is Thomas Björkman, plant physiologist at Cornell University. The Dutch, he says, brought buckwheat to the New World, planting it in the Hudson Valley. Then as now, buckwheat had the advantage of requiring neither a rich soil nor much fertilizer. Yields in the early days were similar to those of corn and wheat, and buckwheat became an important American crop, especially in New York and Pennsylvania, reaching its peak in the 1860s. Slowly, as breeders began to multiply the yields of other grains, buckwheat gave way to them. Buckwheat’s yield is little changed even now, because it can’t be inbred. No statistics are kept, but Björkman estimates that New York might have 10,000 acres. Apart from the value of the grain, the plant is useful to beekeepers during its long period of bloom. In late summer, before alfalfa reblossoms and goldenrod appears, buckwheat is one of the few sources of nectar.

Two standard North American references, published in the first part of the 20th century and never superseded, agree with one another. John H. Lovell wrote in 1926, in Honey Plants of North America (North of Mexico), that buckwheat has “a dark purplish color, and looks much like old New Orleans or sorghum molasses… The flavor, to one who is accustomed to clover and basswood honey, is more or less nauseous.” Frank C. Pellett, in American Honey Plants, first published in 1920, said, “In New York it is regarded as one of the best honey plants.” The honey itself “is very dark and has a strong flavor. People who are accustomed to light and mild honey of the clover type seldom like it.” He too referred to “a peculiar flavor, slightly nauseating to one unaccustomed to it.” It’s some indication of the nature of the flavor that in France buckwheat honey was traditionally used to sweeten pain d’épices, a “gingerbread” of medieval origin, made with rye flour mixed in a curious aged dough. I’m someone who does like buckwheat honey. Neither floral nor fruity in taste, it’s somewhat reminiscent of European forest honeys from honeydew or chestnut, but without the latter’s bitterness.

The first buckwheat honey I ever encountered was in US health-food stores, whose brands could be blackstrap-looking and crude-tasting — intense. More recently, I discovered the versions from Poland, where buckwheat is highly regarded and often a component of mead, of which Poland is the most important traditional maker. Three bottles of miód gryczany from Polish markets around New York City came in shades of dark amber. In flavor, each differed from the others only slightly; they were strong but not crude and to me delicious.

Between the blackish versions and the Polish ones, I began to wonder what more or less pure buckwheat honey in top condition really tastes like. Although the qualities of most honeys are lost to blending, heating, and filtration, the honey in each individual hive varies constantly, not just from year to year but even during the course of a day, reflecting the precise flowers in bloom in that location at that moment as well as the weather, particularly rainfall. Any single-blossom honey contains at least a little nectar from other flowers.

In early fall, the wine importer Neal Rosenthal sent me a jar of the buckwheat honey he makes on his farm near Pine Plains in the Hudson Valley. His miscellany of crops includes 12 to 15 acres of buckwheat for honey; Rosenthal plows and sows the seed himself. (“I get it from Fedco in Maine,” he says. “I’m so devoted to Fedco, I even get my chicken mash from there.”) Four to six weeks later the flowers appear: “It’s a really beautiful plant. Our fields are white from the beginning of June to early September.” The flower “has this nutty, earthy smell,” he says, comparing it with the smell of buckwheat pancakes. Rosenthal spins the honey from the comb using a hand-cranked Italian extractor, and he fills pint canning jars, one by one, applying the labels by hand. His summer “virgin comb” buckwheat honey had a certain elegance and a lingering aftertaste. (“Virgin comb” is newly built by the bees rather than having been left from a previous year and simply refilled; reused comb allows the bees to put more of their effort into making honey.) The color and flavor of Rosenthal’s honey, however, were lighter than those of what is typically called buckwheat. “Nothing is completely pure,” he noted. “The bees pass something that’s interesting and they go to it.” But he believes his honey is overwhelmingly buckwheat: “We have so much,” he explained.

I began to collect more examples, from New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Ohio, Minnesota, South Dakota, California. I looked for the most recent harvest, because honey loses flavor (and darkens) over time, and to have it in top condition I tried to buy directly from the beekeeper. I also looked for examples that had been heated as little as possible. Some labels say “raw,” but beekeepers don’t agree on what that means — there’s no set maximum temperature — and you can’t fill smaller jars unless the honey is warm enough to flow. I looked for honey that hadn’t been filtered but merely strained. (If a few dark flecks have risen to the top of a jar, I consider that a reassuring sign that the flavor hasn’t been tampered with.) I didn’t care so much whether the honey had crystallized, which almost all honeys eventually do. That doesn’t affect flavor, although it can be a sign of age or of the presence of another nectar especially prone to crystallization.

I asked some of the beekeepers about the typical qualities of buckwheat honey, but that tended to evoke only a description of the variables that affect the color and flavor of any honey. They would say how hard it is to be certain of the origins of nectar. Nick Calderone, head of the Dyce Laboratory for Honey Bee Studies at Cornell, did confirm for me that buckwheat honey is “very dark, it’s very strong.” He called it “nutty with a hint of cinnamon — I just think it’s really strong,” he said. “Whether it’s 100 percent or 50 percent is hard to tell.”

Björkman, the buckwheat expert, asserted, “You could easily find 100 or 200 distinct buckwheat honeys in a given year.” Scientifically, he assured me, the principal flavor compounds have been identified and they are all malty. Yet he went on to say — you may want to skip the rest of this paragraph — that, besides bees, another and perhaps originally more important pollinator of buckwheat is flies, including some that feed on carrion. He explained that the smell of buckwheat flowers in a greenhouse is cloying and intense, like rotting flesh and manure: “I’m sure that aroma is present in buckwheat honey in varying degrees.”

I repeatedly tasted a dozen buckwheat honeys side by side. As a rule, the lighter the color, the lighter the flavor, and you could call those presumably diluted versions more elegant. They appealed to a couple of casual tasters who didn’t like the full-throated versions. One honey had some cinnamon spice. One ended with a slight bitter note. Both California examples had an odd, lingering flavor of something rotten, one of them strongly so. Maybe I’m too much swayed by the conventional view, but I conclude that more or less pure buckwheat honey is dark amber when liquid, with at least a suggestion of black, a one-pound jar being impossible to see through. The sweetness is countered by more acidity than many honeys have. The flavor is always strong, and the aftertaste lingers. Compared with other honeys, buckwheat has an extra amount of what I might call honey essence; it also has that particular animal aroma and flavor that some people consider unpleasant. My two favorite examples had an additional specific nuttiness that recalled kasha. It could be they were the closest to pure.

The best of the group came from Brian Fredericksen of Ames Farm in Minnesota, who doesn’t treat his bees with miticide or truck them long distances to pollinate various crops. (For your sake and the bees’, and to support those who do good work, it’s best to buy honey from beekeepers who, rather than apply chemicals, breed for resistance to mites, beekeepers whose primary product is honey and not pollination services.) Buckwheat is “not the easiest plant to get nectar from,” Fredericksen explained to me over the phone, and the kind of buckwheat makes less difference than the location. “Buckwheat on some soils won’t even produce nectar. We’ve seen that time and again.” He said, “You need rain every five days.”

His “Blue Earth” buckwheat honey came from a former sheep farm where the soil is both rich and moist. Like me, Fredericksen found a hint of kasha in this honey, calling it “a little reminiscent of a buckwheat pancake.” He believes that in some years the honey is close to 100 percent buckwheat, although it has been lower in the last two years. He explained, “You can see it in the frames.” The color might be consistent in nine to ten frames and then suddenly different when the flowers have died from a change in the weather. Darker buckwheat honey is purer, he said, unless an unscrupulous beekeeper has cut the honey with something dark. He finds that his buckwheat honey crystallizes rapidly and can even crystallize in the comb, which makes it hard to extract: “You have to get it out of the hive early.”

I asked about the price of his honey, about $17 a pound, since I had bought some reasonably dark and tasty buckwheat honey for as little as $15 for five pounds. Fredericksen reminded me that honey isn’t the main source of income for some beekeepers, and in fact the producer of the inexpensive honey had told me he trucks his hives to southern California to pollinate the almond crop. Fredericksen keeps bees in 18 Minnesota locations, always looking for ones that will give honey with something unique. “We don’t blend from one beehive to another,” he said, calling each honey “a floral snapshot of one time period” — “a magical little moment, and who am I to mix that?” A hive normally gives him 60 to 70 jars of 250 grams. Each bears the number of the hive; the one in front of me as I write comes from 902aa.●

Adapted from issue 80

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