Consumer Voice

How to Tell One Honey from the Other (Adulterate­d) One

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Here are a few simple tests you can do at home to check if your honey is high-quality and pure, or impure and with a high water content.

Read the label

The first thing you should do before buying a jar of honey is read the label and check that the ingredient list doesn’t contain ‘high-fructose corn syrup’ or commercial glucose, two additives that are frequently used to ‘stretch’ the honey and keep it from solidifyin­g.

Solidifica­tion of the honey

All honey is liquid, but with time they tend to solidify, or ‘crystalliz­e’ into a substance resembling grains of sugar. If you buy a jar of honey that is already crystalliz­ed, it is pure. If your honey is liquid, you can wait a few days to see if it solidifies or throw it in the fridge to accelerate the process. If the honey never crystalliz­es, there is a high probabilit­y that it is adulterate­d honey.

Some Tricks

Take a tablespoon of honey and put it in a glass of water. If the honey dissolves, then it is not pure. Pure honey should stay together as a solid when submerged in water. Take a bit of honey and mix it with water. Then place four or five drops of vinegar into the solution. If it turns foamy, the honey might have been adulterate­d with gypsum. Scoop a bit of honey into a spoon and let it fall from the spoon. Honey with high water content will fall quickly. Mature honey of good quality will stay on the spoon or fall very slowly. Light a match and try to burn some of the honey. If it lights and burns, then it is pure. Impure or lowquality honey often contains extra water that keeps it from burning. If you have iodine at home, take some honey, mix it with water, and add a few drops of iodine. If the solution turns blue, then the honey has been adulterate­d with some sort of starch or flour. Take a small piece of old, hard bread and submerge it in the honey. If, when you remove it 10 minutes later, the bread is still hard, then the honey is pure. If there is a lot of water in the honey, the bread will soften.

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