Fermented Garlic Honey

Fermented garlic honey. Those three words together might sound delicious to you, or weird.

Either way, you should be fermenting some garlic honey. It’s the perfect home remedy for when you are feeling under the weather.

Although not written in stone, our family seems to have two major times of the year when we get hit with colds and flu. Sometime around Christmas is the first one which I am convinced happens because we are over stressed, overtired, and over sugared.

Over sugared is a term, right? If it isn’t, it really should be because it’s a serious epidemic around the holidays.

The second time of year we tend to get sick is in early spring, when the seasons are changing. Something about the weather changes that give us all nagging colds.

Overall we tend to not get hit with the flu too often, thankfully. However, colds seem to frequent our house a little more than I’d like.

Therefore, in an effort to cut back on the number of colds our family gets, or for how long it lingers at least, I’ve been on a mission to use more home remedies, along with preventative measures. I don’t want to add more store bought medications than I have to because over the years we’ve had so many that it has done a number on some of our stomachs in this house.

Fermented garlic honey is a great remedy to keep in your cupboard for when you or anyone else feels under the weather. While it may seem weird at first, just think about all those honey garlic flavored sauces you’ve had on things like ribs and chicken wings! Doesn’t sound so weird after all, does it?

Many of us have heard that eating a clove of garlic when you are sick can help heal your cold. However, have you ever chewed on a raw piece of garlic? It’s pretty hard to handle. I LOVE garlic, and I can handle a bit of spice in my food, but there is no way I can handle just popping a whole raw garlic clove in my mouth and eating it.

This is where adding it with honey and fermenting it helps. You get the awesome benefits of garlic, but your mouth won’t burn as you eat it because the honey sweetens it right up.

Honey on it’s own is pretty awesome for sickness too. Many of us have heard of drinking warm water with honey and lemon in it when we aren’t feeling well. So, it makes sense that combining honey and garlic, two powerhouse health foods can help you.

When it comes to the type of honey you pick for this, you want it to be raw. Raw honey is the only honey I will buy now. I used to buy the regular honey in the store that was not raw. I figured it had to be better than refined sugar.

Well, turns out, not so much. Honey is a lot more costlier than sugar so if I am going to be paying extra money, I want it to be a heck of a lot better for me than the refined sugar. While pasteurized honey may be a little bit better than refined sugar, it’s not as good as many of us have believed.

Once I discovered that pasteurized honey wasn’t much better than regular sugar I decided I would only buy raw honey.

Honey has polyphenols which act as antioxidants which help reduce inflammation and lower risk of heart disease. However, raw honey has higher levels of these polyphenols than pasteurized honey because pasteurization kills off some of that “good for you” stuff.

There is a risk when it comes to eating raw honey though, and that is botulism. This is why they do not recommend babies, pregnant women, and anyone who is immune compromised to consume raw honey.

However, if none of those apply to you, you should make this fermented garlic honey. It takes time for the garlic honey to ferment, so you really should aim to make this BEFORE cold season. It needs at least a good month, but gets better the longer it sits.

This fermented garlic honey is not only good for when you have a cold, you can use it in cooking. This would be absolutely delicious as part of a vinaigrette but also to use on meats or whatever else you can think of. Basically, you’re probably going to want to make extra.

HOW TO MAKE FERMENTED GARLIC HONEY

I am not going to really call this a recipe, because it is too simple to call it that. 🙂

Peel your garlic. I used two heads of garlic. You’ll want your garlic to fill the honey about 3/4 of the way full so it all depends on how much you want to make.

Also, can we talk about how peeling garlic downright stinks? I know there are all these secrets, like tossing them all in a mason jar and shaking like a maniac, but I never have really good luck with these types of things. I have also tried the “slam down on the side of your butcher’s knife against the garlic” method, and it didn’t work for me.

At one point I even bought this special garlic peeler that was supposed to make peeling a breeze, but it didn’t work for me. Maybe I just have a problem when it comes to peeling garlic.

Anyways, once you peel your garlic stick it in a mason jar or some other type of jar.  I use an old honey jar. Cover your garlic with honey. You don’t want to put too much honey in it. You want to do enough just until it covers your honey.

I eyeballed it. No exact measurement here, but if you want to work with exact measurements, you’ll want to do roughly 1 part honey, 1 part cloves.

Once I poured the honey in I screwed the lid on tightly and then I put the jar upside down to make sure all the garlic was nicely coated. I then flipped the jar right side up again.

You may want to put a dish of some sort under the jar as the fermentation process can cause the jar to overflow a little bit and then you have a sticky mess.  This is also why you want to make sure you use a jar where there is some space at the top.

After that you just leave it on your counter, and each day you want to unscrew the lid to let any built up gases escape, and then you will flip the jar upside down for a minute, and then back the right side up. You could also stir it instead of flipping it, but why dirty an extra spoon every day? When you don’t have a dishwasher, you avoid any extra messes on dishes!

The point of flipping it is to make sure the garlic continues to be coated by the honey. With any kind of fermentation the goal is to keep the food you are fermenting under liquid to prevent molding.

You will eventually see air bubbles forming. This is good! It means fermenting is happening. 🙂

After a few weeks you should no longer need to open the jar to let the gases escape. You’ll know when you go to open the jar and you don’t feel pressure anymore. This will happen when the fermentation process is slowing down, which you will be able to see with less and less air bubbles forming, and the garlic cloves may start sinking to the bottom of the jar instead of floating.

You may notice the honey darken over time. This is completely normal.

You can store the fermented garlic honey in a cupboard until you need it.  Again, you want to wait at least a month before consuming it, but the longer the better.  3 months is a really good length of time to wait if you can.

HOW TO USE FERMENTED GARLIC HONEY

To use it when you have a cold, just take a teaspoon when needed, every few hours or so. You can take a teaspoon of just the honey, or if you are brave enough, eat a clove. The clove flavor will be mellowed out by the honey.

Fermented garlic honey is definitely an easy home remedy to keep on hand and doesn’t take that long to whip up.

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