Buckwheat Honey

Botanical Name: Common buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum)

Botanical Family: Polygonaceae

Bee Species:

Apis mellifera, the western honey bee, makes buckwheat honey everywhere it is made. One subspecies has a history bound to this crop: the Carniolan bee of Slovenia became a world export breed inside an eighteenth-century beekeeping economy that the Slovenian state’s own account says grew on reliable late-summer buckwheat pasture.

The bee’s day on buckwheat is short. The flowers open in the morning and stop giving nectar around midday; a Hokkaido producer describes the bees’ flying stopping dead in the afternoon during soba season, and beekeepers there move hives onto the fields at two in the morning, in the cool, to spare the colonies. When the nectar is flowing, it flows heavily – ten to fifteen pounds of honey into a colony in a day.

Color:

Dark amber to purple-black, with red to bordeaux glints in the light

Flavor Profile:

Malty and molasses-rich, less sweet than most honey, with a bitter edge and a sharp finish that catches at the throat

Tasting Notes:

Malt and molasses are the words in every language, each with its own accent: molasses and toffee in Russia, molasses with an aftertaste of buckwheat groats in Poland, burnt caramel in Lithuania, roasted malt in Latvia, salted-butter caramel and liquorice in France, nutty caramel in Slovenia, Japanese black sugar – kuromitsu – in Japan, brown sugar in China, and plum, tobacco and cherry from a Minnesota single-source producer.

The finish is the signature. Russia’s state standard describes the taste as sweet, pleasant and sharp, making the throat rasp; Polish sellers say slightly burning, even scratchy; a Belarusian apiary praises its light pinching of the gullet; French and North American producers call it piquant, a tickle. Across the whole range, a buckwheat honey that does not catch at the throat raises doubts about the label.

No honey divides buyers more openly, and the trade says so in its own words. A Polish family apiary counts as many supporters as opponents and warns against giving it as a gift unless you know the recipient. Japan sells it as the adult’s honey. A Slovenian producer writes that the smell recalls the stable and animals; an Austrian beekeeper told a national paper it stinks of the pigsty but tastes magnificent; and Chinese folk description reaches for smelly feet. The same jars win gold medals and best-dark-honey placings.

Aroma:

Strong and pungent; malt and buckwheat flour over an animal note producers compare to the farmyard

Defining Compounds:

The chemistry behind the flavour is unusually well mapped. The malty aroma is primarily 3-methylbutanal, with sotolon and beta-damascenone completing the honey’s most potent odorants; the short-chain acids – isovaleric and butanoic – carry the animal note, and an Italian trial honey was matched to a Polish reference by exactly this volatile fingerprint. The dark colour comes with high phenolic content: buckwheat honey showed the highest antioxidant readings among the floral sources in the landmark American comparison, the highest phenolics among Korean monofloral honeys, and enough of a phenolic signature that a Canadian laboratory identifies it chemically when filtration has removed the pollen. China’s bee research institute reports 4-hydroxybenzaldehyde as its own marker for the honey. Processing takes more from this honey than from most – one study measured a third of its antioxidant capacity lost – which is part of why it is so often sold raw.

Forage Origin:

Common buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum, Polygonaceae) is a grain crop from outside the grass family – kin to rhubarb and sorrel, grown and milled like wheat. Every name it carries describes it. The Latin Fagopyrum and the Dutch boecweite both mean beech-wheat, for the three-sided seed shaped like a small beechnut, and English took its word from the Dutch. The French sarrasin is the old word for Saracen, given to the dark grain; the Slavic names descend from the word for Greek. The plant was domesticated in southwest China, in the river gorges where Tibet, Yunnan and Sichuan meet – the wild ancestor still grows there – and spread west along the southern Himalaya, reaching Europe roughly three thousand years ago.

The flowers explain how the honey is made. Buckwheat flowers come in two forms; a plant carries only one, and a flower sets seed only when insects bring pollen from the other form – the pollen does not travel on the wind. A field without bees yields a small fraction of a normal seed crop, so farmers have wanted beekeepers beside their buckwheat for as long as both trades have existed. The flowers give nectar only in the morning, most heavily in cool weather, and keep opening until frost kills the plant. A field in flower is white, strongly scented, and can yield up to 150 pounds of honey to the acre.

Two other plants share the name and give no honey of this kind. Tartary buckwheat – the hardier, bitter species of the high Asian belts – pollinates itself, barely opens its flowers, and yields no honey. That is why China’s buckwheat honey comes from the north: the celebrated Tartary districts of the southwest grow grain and make no honey of it, while the common-buckwheat belts of the north make the honey. In the American West, “California buckwheat honey” comes from Eriogonum, a wild shrub in the same family but a different genus – a lighter, milder honey that shares nothing with this one but the word.

One modern fact runs through every revival: the new varieties are often poorer honey plants than the old ones. Slovenian and Dutch sources say it independently – today’s buckwheat yields nectar poorly beside the old landraces – and Canadian seed literature says the same of an export variety bred for shatter resistance. Where the grain has come back, the nectar has not always come back with it.

Pairings:

It goes where molasses and dark sugar go, and the pairing lists agree across languages. Cheese first: Stilton, blue and goat cheese in the English-speaking trade, white farmer’s cheese in Poland. Then coffee – a Belarusian beekeeper says buckwheat honey is the honey that works best in it – dark chocolate, meat glazes and marinades, and ice cream, where an American chef churns it in as an ingredient. In Japan it goes where black sugar goes: kinako mochi, vanilla ice cream, milk. Breton producers spread it on the buckwheat galette itself. Producers on three continents offer the same buyer’s guide: people who like dark beer, strong coffee or aged cheese usually like this honey 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.