Product Review - Honey Powder

A friend, visiting last week, mentioned in passing that they had been traveling through a small town to the south of us and stopped at a local grocery store to pick up a few essentials.  Imagine her surprise, when going toward the checkout line, she noticed a large, hand-lettered sign with the words "Emergency Survival Food".  Intrigued, she made her way toward the rows of #10 tins to investigate.  She toted home a few tins of banana chips and quickly made plans to revisit the store to further bolster her preparedness supplies.  Of course, I filed this information away with hopes that we too would be making our way south in the near future so that I could check out this "survival" section of a mainstream grocery store.

Today was that day.  Sir Knight, the kids and I headed south to attend our nephew's birthday party and had to drive right past that very store.  How could we possibly not stop?  A quick trip inside revealed a gold mind of emergency essentials.  Sure enough, rows upon rows of dehydrated foods in #10 tins consumed premium space right next to the checkout counter.  Standard fair such as powdered milk and potato gems were present along with other not-so-common items like powdered scrambled eggs, butter powder and honey powder.  We picked up a few tins of this and that so that we could evaluate the quality of the food and decide what we were interested in stocking up on.  The honey powder was especially intriguing, since we had never heard of such a thing.  I couldn't wait to get home and try it.

Honey powder in the can
(it was about 2/3 full - it is filled
by weight and not by volume)

Mixing the powder with water

The honey powder package had direction for using both straight from the can (in powder form) and rehydrating the powder and using as table honey.  I thought it more likely that we would reconstitute the honey and use it in liquid form so I followed the rehydrating directions, with really exceptional results.

First, I measured 1 cup of honey powder into a saucepan, slowly added 1/4 cup of cold water and stirred to combine.  After the powder and water had been sufficiently mixed, I put the saucepan on the stove and slowly heated the mixture up until the sugars went into solution.  Of course, at this point we had to taste the honey to see if it was remotely edible.  It was great!  I was very surprised.  It was the taste and consistency of "regular" honey.  I would gladly put the reconstituted honey on my table.

Heating the honey

The honey after the sugars have dissolved

It was exciting to see preparedness foods in a chain grocery store.  We brought home a brochure for the supplier, Augason Farms, which showcased even more products than the grocery store had carried.  The prices in the grocery store were considerably less than they are on the Augason Farms website, which I attribute to the shear bulk that is carried in the store location.

It is even the right consistency and color!

Although honey has an incredibly long shelf life, I think the honey powder is definitely a worthy addition to our preparedness stores.  I will definitely be frequenting that grocery store and adding to our honey powder supply.