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South China Morning Post

Why restaurants are buzzing over honey's flavour and natural goodness – it headlines dishes at Simon Rogan's Michelin-starred L'Enclume and Rogan & Co, and Five Sails at Vancouver's Pan Pacific Hotel

When Daria Andriienko was growing up in a small village just north of Kyiv, Ukraine, she visited her paternal grandmother's bee farm every weekend. She vividly remembers how the taste of the honey evolved through the year. 'We would always have a lot of fresh honey products depending on the season. As it starts in spring, the first blossom would be cassia honey, and then buckwheat, and then when the sunflowers start blooming, we had sunflower honey,' Andriienko says, explaining that the honey's floral notes come from the pollen the bees collect on their legs and bodies. She recalls wearing face protection as she watched her grandparents slowly approach the beehives and pull out large frames filled with honeycombs. Advertisement Honey is deliciously sweet yet has a lower glycemic index than most sugars and is full of nutrients too. 'When they started scraping the honeycombs, there would be wax there … We would chew it like gum because that wax is filled with honey, and so you chew it like a natural type of candy, and just spit out the [wax] leftovers. You can't chew too much because the honey is so sweet,' Andriienko says. The Ukrainian also remembers how, when she stayed overnight at her grandparents' farm, the next morning their breakfast consisted of freshly baked bread similar to brioche, which they would spread honey on, washing it down with fresh milk from the neighbour's cows. It's these sweet memories that inspired her in her role as pastry chef at Five Sails, a fine-dining restaurant in the Pan Pacific Hotel in Vancouver, Canada, to recreate a Ukrainian honey cake using locally sourced ingredients. The multilayered traditional cake from Eastern Europe is made with honey, flour, eggs and baking soda. The dough is divided into eight parts, and rolled out into sheets and baked in the oven. Andriienko makes the icing with sour cream, double cream and honey harvested from Lillooet, a town 250km northeast of Vancouver.