I’ve made honey ice cream before but frankly, it didn’t rock my world. It was OK but there were no goosebumps, no sighs of utter bliss. So I was keen to to try it again, especially after meeting a nice gentleman from Golden North at Food SA’s recent Think Food event.
I’ve been a big fan of Golden North’s signature honey ice cream since I was a kid but my Dad and I were convinced that the original recipe had been tinkered with – sometimes the honey flavour was strong and other times it was barely discernible. Similarly, the colour seemed to vary from a pale buttercream to a more golden yellow.
So I took the ice cream sample the Golden North representative offered and interrogated him as fiercely as I could while spooning ice cream into my mouth.
Surprisingly, he assured me that their recipe for honey ice cream has never been changed. Any variations in taste and colour are because of the seasonal variations in the Blue Gum honey they source from a local apiary.
Blue Gum honey? No wonder I like their ice cream so much: blue gum honey – produced by bees feeding from Eucalytus globulus – is my go-to Australian honey. And, as luck would have it, I’d recently visited Buzz Honey in the Adelaide Hills and bought myself a one kilogram tub.
It seemed like the universe was trying to tell me something.
