A taste of honey
If you’ve gone shopping for health-giving raw honey to spoon onto your coffee, crumpets or cooking, you may have found yourself just a tad overwhelmed by the wide array of options available.
So, let’s talk about which raw honey will suit your tastes.
Seven types of New Zealand raw honey from Manuka Corner
To help you choose which raw honey to buy, the list below goes into the ins and outs of the different varieties we have on offer. We look at tastes, textures and where we’ve grown it in New Zealand.
Kamahi Honey
This honey gives an intense taste sensation and after tones. It is a pale, beautifully buttery golden colour with a smooth, creamy texture.
Its strong complex flavour is perfect for recipes that require an identifiable honey taste; chefs love it. It is a great base to sweet sauces, an ideal sweetener for spicy dishes, such as Thai food, delicious used as a light glaze or just plain drizzled onto pancakes. It’s a fabulous match with camembert, brie and washed rind cheeses and holds its own beautifully with cheeses such as a goat feta.
Manuka Honey
Our raw manuka honey is sourced from the breath-taking Central Plateau and southern Waikato regions of New Zealand
Manuka honey has an intense, but pleasant, flavour profile. It is a strongly flavoured honey with woody, nutty characteristics and intense toffee and caramel notes. It has a medium sweetness and a slightly bitter aftertaste. Some compare the taste to halva, a Middle Eastern dessert made from nut butter and sugar.
It is dark amber in colour and can even have a ‘jellied’ like texture.
Pōhutukawa Honey
Pōhutukawa honey is a unique coastal honey. Every summer the flowers of the pohutukawa tree add vibrant red to New Zealand’s stunning coastline. Pohutukawa honey is collected every December when the flowers are in full, bright red bloom.
Pale gold in colour, it is a delicate, sweet honey, with floral flavours and a subtle, surprising salty aftertaste. Our pōhutukawa honey is well balanced and finely textured.
This season’s pōhutukawa is from Tauranga Bay and truly captures the taste of the New Zealand summer.
Due to scarcity of supply, pōhutukawa honey is only available at limited times.
Wild Clover Honey
Clover honey has a pale creamy colour and a delicate, mild, sweet flavour that lingers in the mouth. The aroma of the honey is similar to that of a sweet pear or apple. It has fudge-like characteristics and a very smooth texture.
Wild Clover Honey is great used in cooking, due to its mild flavor and intense sweetness. It is lovely spread on warm, fresh bread or scones, or with grainy crackers and nutty cheeses, such as emmental and gruyere. It works beautifully in dessert sauces or on oven-roasted fruit like peaches and nectarines.
Our raw wild clover honey is sourced from white clover flowers from the fresh and diverse pastures of New Zealand’s temperate Northland region.
Rewarewa Honey
Rewarewa is NZ’s honeysuckle and grows from NZ’s lowlands to the mountain forests.
Raw rewarewa honey has a delightful smooth, full bodied caramel-like flavour. The rich red honey has smokey complex flavours with a clean strong finish. The warmth of the wood is reflected in the honey yielded from its flowers.
Raw rewarewa honey is high in natural antioxidants.
Kanuka Honey
Kanuka is a lovely sweet honey and a buttery light colour. It has a crisp, aromatic butterscotch taste, similar to manuka honey, with a delightfully clean finish.
Kanuka honey is a much scarcer honey variety than manuka due to the fact that kanuka bushes seldom grow as a monoculture separate to manuka plants.
Bush Honey
Raw bush blend honey has intense aromas, a slightly herbal flavour and a rich, velvety texture . This season’s bush honey is a mixture of rewarewa, kanuka and manuka. The rich, fruity taste and texture is perfect for your everyday needs. It is great for cooking, baking and desserts or just sweetening up your porridge, tea or coffee.
Our raw bush honey was collected from the heart of the North Island’s native bush.
