Honey is a natural preservative and sweetner

Posted on Dec 09, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Food, Home & Garden, Susie Collins

I love honey! I have it in my tea every morning, and put it on toast, English muffins, bagels, and the occasional peanut butter and banana sandwich. (LOL, I just made myself hungry writing that.)

I also add it to my favorite homemade salad dressing, which I make by blending olive oil, balsamic vinegar, a dollop of organic mustard and another dollop of honey.

So guess what? A recent study shows that the added honey is helping the salad dressing stay fresh while making it sweet and also giving me some antioxidants. Ooooooo, another reason to love honey!

Note to Commercial Food Scientists: You don’t need to put nasty chemical additives and high fructose corn syrup in salad dressing. Cut it out!

Antioxidant-rich honey is a healthy alternative to chemical additives and refined sweeteners in commercial salad dressings, said a new University of Illinois study.

“To capitalize on the positive health effects of honey, we experimented with using honey in salad dressings,” said Nicki Engeseth, a U of I associate professor of food chemistry. “We found that the antioxidants in honey protected the quality of the salad dressings for up to nine months while sweetening them naturally.”

Engeseth’s study substituted honey for EDTA, an additive used to keep the oils in salad dressings from oxidizing, and high-fructose corn syrup, used by many commercial salad-dressing producers to sweeten their salad dressing recipes.

“We chose clover and blueberry honeys for the study after an analysis of the sweetening potential, antioxidant activity, and phenolic profiles of 19 honeys with varying characteristics,” said the scientist.

The dressings were also compared to a control dressing that contained ingredients found in current commercial salad dressings, she said.

Engeseth explained a problem the scientists encountered in using honey in a salad dressing system. “Salad dressings are emulsions-they contain oil and water; and to keep these ingredients together in one phase, manufacturers rely on emulsifiers and thickening agents to avoid thinning of the dressing and separation of the oil and water phase,” she said.

When the researchers found that enzymes in the honey broke the emulsion by attacking the starch that was used to thicken the dressing, they came up with a new formulation that used xanthan gum as a thickening agent, which they then used in all the dressings, she said.

The researchers then stored the dressings under various conditions, including 37 degrees Celsius (accelerated storage) for six weeks and 23 degrees Celsius and 4 degrees Celsius for one year, followed by an evaluation of their oxidative stability.

“After nine months of storage, both types of honey were as effective as EDTA in protecting against oxidation or spoilage. Blueberry honey performed slightly better than clover,” she said.

Engeseth said that many consumers prefer products with natural ingredients and that salad dressings made with honey should appeal to these consumers.

“There’s such a wide range of salad dressings on the market–some unique salad dressings as well as inexpensive products that perform beautifully. If manufacturers are interested in developing salad dressings that have a healthy twist, we’ve demonstrated that using honey as both an antioxidant and a sweetener is one way to do this,” she said.

The article was published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Co-authors are Carolyn Rasmussen of Kraft Foods, Sophia Leung of Newlywed Foods, Lia M. Andrae-Nightingale, a former U of I graduate student, and Xiao-Hong Wang and Shelly J. Schmidt of the University of Illinois.

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Photo by Blentley

Thanks, Linda!

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11 Responses to “Honey is a natural preservative and sweetner”

Mokihana

10. Dec, 2008

Aloha, I write with the companionship of my cup of tea with coconut milk (of course!) and honey. I love it. I mean a new to me bee keeper at the Sunday Farmer’s Market … he had buckwheat honey … thick and dark like molasses…and according to the bee man is one of the finest forms of antioxidant and antibiotics. I bought some. WOOW what a flavor. We keep honey as a first-aid kit—it works to soothe burns and when Pete cuts himself slathe the honey and it heals.

Honey, the ancient goods is the work of all those very industrious bees. And you know they are having one hell of a time staying clear of all the pesticides that are making it hard for them to ‘spot’ the flowers and kill them when they do get there. Malama the honey bees.

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Kerry

10. Dec, 2008

Hi Susie, Oh, you’ve got me craving honey this morning. I am a honey lover too, always have been. I remember when I was a kid and had to take medicine, my mom would smash it up and mix it in a teaspoon of honey so I would eat it.

Isn’t it unusual and oh so nice to have a yummy food turn out to be good for us.

Honey–another reason to help our bees too. Kerry

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Ruth

10. Dec, 2008

Oooh, you make it sound so good, and I know it is! I can not tolerate honey as it makes my throat scratchy immediately when I use it. Boo hoo. You all enjoy it for me!!!

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Leslie

10. Dec, 2008

Don’t feel bad Ruth- I can’t eat honey either!

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Susie Collins

10. Dec, 2008

Oh boo. What do you guys use as a sweetener?

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Ruth

10. Dec, 2008

I use Stevia in anything that I would use regular sugar in…it’s OK, but I would much rather be using honey….I love the whole idea of how we get honey from Bees and the process they go through to bring it to us….. I hate the idea of what the pesticides have done to them….I understand that if we lose the Bees, we lose so much of our food supply, too. When will people wake up….it is so stupid!!!! Aaaaarrrrrrghghghghghghgh!!!!!!

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Kate

10. Dec, 2008

I can’t seem to figure out how to leave a comment on the main blog page…. had to search comments to do this… where do I click?
Just wanted to say thank you very much Suzie for your comment on my blog and the added link on your page! I enjoy your site as well and am glad to be a member of the community….
Thanks
Kate
libertyandhope.blogspot.com

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Susie Collins

10. Dec, 2008

Hi Kate, aloha and welcome! I know it’s hard to find the comment link. We are working to fix that and make it more readily available on the home and blog page. It looks like you found out how to do it: click on the title of the post and that takes you to the dedicated page with the comment section. You have a very cute blog and I look forward to reading your posts! Aloha, Susie

Hey Everybody, go check out Kate’s blog and leave her some comment love. She’s a canary finding her way in New York. http://libertyandhope.blogspot.com/

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Leslie

11. Dec, 2008

I rarely sweeten anything, but if i want something honey-like, I use rice syrup – it metabolizes slower then any other sugar so causes less mood changes.

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linda

11. Dec, 2008

Maple syrup is another option for some people.
Myself and a number of people I know cannot use Stevia.

I don’t have access to the different kinds of honey like I used to -each has a different flavour. I miss having the choice.

Some people think that in addition to all the pesticides, the cell towers may be disrupting the bees navigation and cellular structures.

I do hope that the planet’s agricultural players can get together and take the threat seriously. We need our bees.

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Susie Collins

11. Dec, 2008

Leslie, I’ve never tried rice syrup! It sounds good. And good to know about the slow release of sugars.

Linda, Oooo, I put maple syrup on oatmeal. I use grade B b/c it has more nutrients. Organic of course!

I often buy the big vats of honey from Cost-U-Less, but we also have amazing local honeys made from kiawe and lehua blossoms, so yummy. We don’t have colony collapse here, but we do have a horrible little mite that is making HUGE trouble. They recently had to destroy all the hives in Hilo that surround the airport. So sad.

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