Greek Honey
It is not an overstatement to say that Greece produces the best honey in the world. The country’s incredibly rich flora provides bees with a huge variety of wild flowering plants on which to feed. Greek honey is thus distinguished by the season and by what bees graze on: flowering plants and blossoms, in the spring; flowering thyme in the early summer; pine in summer and early fall; heather after the first fall rains; chestnut and a few other rarities further along in the year. Beekeepers do not employ their bees in the arduous task of pollinating vast monocultures for industrial farming, but rather move their hives from place to place depending on what is flowering, abetting the bees, in other words. They harvest honey at the end of each feeding cycle. There is one Greek honey variety with Protected Designation of Origin, the fir honey from Vitina in the Peloponnese. Arguably, though, the most sought after honey is the aromatic thyme honey, the most famous of which comes from Crete. Connoisseurs say that the most mineral rich Greek honey is pine honey and that the honey produced in the early fall, after the heather has blossomed, is also extremely beneficial. In the Greek kitchen honey is the most ancient sweetener and is still used as such today, in a wide array of classic and contemporary confections. It also lends depth and balance to many a savory dishes, especially baked beans and some lamb and goat preparations.
