Buckwheat Honey (Miel de sarrasin)

Botanical Name: Common buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum)

Botanical Family: Polygonaceae

Bee Species:

Apis mellifera, the western honey bee, produces every Canadian jar of this honey. No bee native to Canada makes honey at all.

On buckwheat, the bees work only the morning. The flowers open around eight in the morning and give nectar through the morning only; the flow slackens toward noon, and by afternoon the bees have left the field for whatever else is in bloom. The morning hours are enough: a colony beside a flowering field can store ten to fifteen pounds of honey in a day, and one beekeeper of the 1909 crop reported that his apiary “just roared for about five days.”

Color:

Very dark brown to near-black, with red to purple glints in the light

Flavor Profile:

Malty and molasses-rich, earthy, less sweet than most honey, with a bitter edge at the finish

Tasting Notes:

Molasses is the word nearly every Canadian seller uses, in both languages – gout rappelant la melasse in Quebec, a molasses-like flavour in Ontario and Manitoba – and malt comes second. Ontario producers add chocolate and black cherries; a Northern Ontario jar is sold as smokey-malty-coffee-molasses; Quebec sellers add caramelized nuts, dried prunes, cereal and musk. The finish is long, and several accounts place it at the back of the throat – a faint, lingering catch one producer describes as leaving a tickle.

Buyers split over this honey, and the producers say so themselves. A Winnipeg seller puts it plainly: people that like it love it, and if you don’t like it you really don’t like it. People who dislike it describe wet straw and barnyard; people who love it compare it to dark beer – two producers independently call it the Guinness of honeys – and the University of Guelph’s research centre tasters described an aged jar as dark licorice and lightly burnt molasses, and called it a premium honey.

Aroma:

Strong, malty and earthy, with a pungent note some describe as barnyard

Defining Compounds:

The same compounds produce the colour and the flavour. Buckwheat honey is unusually rich in phenolic compounds: in the study that compared seven floral sources, the darkest honeys – buckwheat above all – showed the highest antioxidant readings, and the more phenolic compounds a honey contained, the higher it scored. The concentration is distinctive enough that a McGill food-authenticity laboratory identifies buckwheat honey by its phenolic markers when filtration has removed the pollen. The aroma has its own named chemistry: malty aldehydes – 3-methylbutanal and 2-methylbutanal – alongside isovaleric acid, the short-chain acid that gives the barnyard note. Heating and filtering take more from this honey than from most: one study measured a third of its antioxidant capacity lost in processing, which is part of why Canadian jars are so often sold raw.

Forage Origin:

Common buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum, Polygonaceae) is grown and handled like a grain, though the plant is kin to rhubarb and sorrel rather than to wheat. The name comes from the seed: it is three-sided like a small beechnut, and Middle Dutch called it boecweite, beech wheat – the word English borrowed. The French name, sarrasin, is the old word for Saracen, given to the dark grain. Breton settlers carried the crop to New France in the 1600s, and Pierre Boucher was already recording in 1664 that frost sometimes killed the crop before it ripened.

The plant makes far more flowers than seeds. A field sown in June is white with bloom from midsummer and flowers until a killing frost, but each flower holds a single ovule, and as many as 88 percent set no seed. Buckwheat flowers come in two forms, a plant carries only one of them, and a flower makes seed only when pollen reaches it from the other form. The pollen does not travel on the wind, so insects must carry it. A field without bees yields two to three percent of a normal seed crop, which is why Ontario’s field-crop guide advises growers that an arrangement with an apiarist will be of mutual benefit.

Where the crop grows has shifted twice. It began as an eastern crop – Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick held most of the half-million-acre peak of 1918 – then was planted heavily a second time, on the prairies, where the federal research station at Morden, Manitoba bred large-seeded varieties for the Japanese soba trade: Mancan in 1974, then varieties given Japanese names – Koban, Koto, Koma – for the market they were bred to sell in. Today Quebec is the largest Canadian grower, Ontario grows smaller plantings, including a belt in the northeast whose crop goes to Toronto packers, Manitoba seeds a few thousand acres in the Parkland and Pembina Valley, and New Brunswick sows small fields on the Chaleur coast and in the Madawaska.

Two relatives to set aside. Tartary buckwheat, grown historically for feed and now a listed weed in western Canada, is self-fertile, seldom visited by bees, and yields no honey – a 1951 American Bee Journal note is titled “No honey from Tartary buckwheat.” Wild buckwheat is a twining field weed in the same family that gives no honey. All Canadian buckwheat honey is common buckwheat honey.

Pairings:

It is used where molasses is used. Quebec producers sell it as a molasses substitute – pain d’epices, gingerbread, the galette – and it survives baking that would drive off a pale honey’s flavour. An Ottawa producer suggests it stirred into lemon tea, brushed over roasted meats, baked into honey cake, or taken by the spoonful, and pairs it with a hardy Stilton; other sellers pair it with aged cheese and dark chocolate. Producers observe that buyers who drink dark beer or strong coffee usually like it at once.

Health Uses:

Buckwheat honey was the honey used in one widely cited modern study. A 2007 Pennsylvania pediatric trial gave children with night-time coughs a single bedtime dose of buckwheat honey, a honey-flavoured cough syrup, or nothing: parents rated the honey best, the honey outperformed no treatment on cough frequency, and the syrup did no better than no treatment on any measure. The study was small, single-dose and parent-scored; the National Honey Board was a collaborator; and later trials found similar results with other honeys – the finding concerns honey generally, demonstrated first with this one.