The value of honey is not only in excellent taste. It has long been used as an indispensable remedy for colds and many other diseases, as a source of vitamins and minerals. Its usefulness can be said for a long time and with genuine enthusiasm. But all the qualities of this product are valid only when it is completely natural, and it is not an easy task to find such a product today. Even with the acquisition of honey in the apiary you can not be completely sure of its quality. After all, it can be simply diluted with various surrogates or obtained by feeding spilled sugar syrup, which reduces its utility to zero.
So how do you check the real honey that you are offered to buy? To begin with, you need to buy a trial small portion of the product and try to maximize its naturalness.
How to check the quality of honey at home?
Initially, we evaluate the product for color, consistency and smell. A real honey always has a nice unobtrusive floral aroma, a slightly tart taste, which leads to a slight perspiration in the throat. The natural product is dense, drains from the spoon with a snake, forming a hill that diverges gradually. If you try to pick up a spoon with honey over a plate and crank it, the natural product will wind on it with a thread, and do not drain immediately down. If you add honey to tea, then there should be no sediment, flakes and other inclusions.
Very often falsifications are made with an admixture of chalk. This can be determined if you add a little bit of vinegar or citric acid to the honey solution. If the product is not natural, the mixture will foam strongly.
To make sure that you have natural honey and not banal sugar syrup , you need to dissolve a small amount of the product in distilled water, pour 5 ml of the solution and add to it 2.5 g of lead vinegar or 23 ml of wood alcohol. A plentiful yellowish-white precipitate will indicate the presence of sugar syrup in honey. If honey is natural - there will be no precipitate.
How to test honey for naturalness with iodine?
Many unscrupulous sellers of honey, offer falsifications made on the basis of starch or flour. Identify this will help normal iodine. It is necessary to add a few drops of iodine to the solution of honey in the water. With a positive reaction, the liquid will turn to a bluish color.
Also worth noting that the purchase of a solution of any other shade, other than yellowish or light brown, will indicate external impurities.
We hope that our recommendations will help you avoid undesirable purchases and protect you from buying unnatural honey and using not always useful, and sometimes even a much harmful product.