The Whole Hive

The Whole Hive

Serves 4

Background

For the Pestival menu. The constraint was to develop a recipe/dessert based on all the elements from the beehive beyond honey.

Ingredients

Beeswax ice cream

Freeze, grind and cold-infuse 20g of beeswax into 50g of cream. Leave at 4°C for 18h.

The next day, freeze, grind and hot-infuse 50g of beeswax into 350g of cream. Put into water bath at 80°C for 1h.

Meanwhile, pass the cold infusion through a superbag. Weigh out 30g and reserve. Melt the trimoline over gentle heat (should not be hot, just liquid) and mix with the milk, yogurt, guar gum and salt.

When the hot infusion is done, put it in the blast freezer until the cream reaches body temperature. The beeswax should solidify in a block—throw it away and pass the rest of the cream through a superbag. Weigh 270g of the hot-infused cream and add the 30 g of cold-infused cream. Blend with the rest of the ingredients in a pacojet container and freeze.

Wait until it’s frozen, paco and most importantly taste it!

Honey kombucha

Mix ingredients together, keep at room temperature and cover to keep out any flies. Let ferment 4-5 days, and taste every day after that until desired balance of sourness and sweetness is reached. Refrigerate to keep fermentation in stasis.

Honey kombucha sauce

Mix the kombucha and pollen. Stir.

Cold-infuse at 4°C for 18h, stirring occasionally, except for the last couple of hours. At the end the pollen should have sedimented. Pass the mixture through a superbag.

Add agar and mix thoroughly. Bring to the boil, hold for 30 seconds, then remove from heat. Let it cool until it sets. Blitz in the thermomix until smooth, and pour into a squeeze bottle.

Propolis tincture

Macerate for at least one week; longer the better. Strain and keep in an atomiser.

Honey crisps

To reproduce the beautiful hexagonal beeswax shape, we made our own moulds by pressing beeswax into silicon. Dust a thin layer of crumiel on the moulds. Put in the oven at 150°C for 3 minutes. Remove from oven, press beneath a silicon sheet and return to the oven for 30s.

Remove from oven, wait until the caramel has reached body temperature and peel the crisps carefully from the mould.

Just before serving spray with some propolis tincture.

To finish

Chill the plate. Sprinkle a bit of crumiel just off-centre of the plate. Make a rochet of the beeswax ice cream and spoon onto the crumiel. Squeeze a small amount of the honey kombucha sauce onto the plate near one end of the rochet. Place a honey crisp upright, nestled between the ice cream and the honey kombucha sauce—they should be placed to keep it upright. Finish the plate with a sprinkle of crumiel, broken pieces of bee bread, and cherry or apple blossom petals and sepals.