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Dessert

To Extract the Honey From the Combs

This method extracts honey from combs using a warm room, cutting, draining, and filtering.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and horse work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

To Extract the Honey From the Combs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the combs

  1. Bring the hives into a warm room free of bees and wasps.

  2. Loosen the combs from the hive using a long, thin knife.

  3. Cut off empty parts of the comb.

  4. Drain black and drossy sections.

  5. Avoid crushing any brood to prevent bad flavors in the honey.

  6. Brush or blow off any bees on the combs.

  7. Wash the combs in warm water if sticky.

Drain and filter

  1. Cut the pure combs into small pieces.

  2. Slice the pieces horizontally at the top and bottom.

  3. Lay the pieces on the wire frames to drain for 2-3 hours, turning them halfway through.

  4. Run the extracted honey through the conical bag to filter it.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Corn + horsetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Corn + honeytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together298 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Horse + honeytop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Honeycombs
Hold the honey, and their wax structure is what is cut, drained and separated from the honey.

The step that matters

Avoid crushing any brood. Crushing brood releases off-flavors into the honey, and the wax cells must be opened gently so the honey drains out without contamination.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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