How does one promote a honey brand, apart from saying that it can be a great addition to your breakfast cereals and milk? And if it’s raw, unpasteurised honey – honey in its purest form – produced and bottled in Himalayan villages, there is so much to be said, so how can one turn what could be just another marketing spiel into an evening of meaningful interactions and good food?
Tenacious Bee Collective is a community-based producer of rare Himalayan honeys harvested ethically from various regions in Himachal Pradesh (Kangra, Lahaul, Bharmaur and Hadsar) and Jammu & Kashmir (Anantnag). When the Collective got in touch with We The Chefs (WTC) to curate an evening centred around the multiple ways its honey varieties can be used for cooking, our band of home chefs put together a grazing table with an eight-item menu starting with a Cheese Platter and Roasted Sweet Potatoes, both drizzled with honey, going up all the way to Honey Glazed Chicken. And in keeping with ayurvedic practices, none of the honey used in the menu was heated, but simply drizzled or used to glaze the food before being tabled.
It was literally a farm-to-fork evening with the honey travelling from apiaries in the far-flung villages, with no middlemen coming in between, to the grazing table that WTC had laid out in Delhi for the well-wishers of the Collective. “It was a lovely spread,” Malini Kochupillai, a community builder and one of the two co-founders of the Collective, said after the event. “Everyone absolutely loved the food.”
The evening was also an opportunity to get to know Tenacious Bee better. The Collective was launched by Malini and her fellow co-founder, Kunal Singh, with the support of the sarpanch of Badsar village (Kangra district), Kirna Devi, in 2018 with the stated purpose of developing sustainable, non-exploitative methods based on scientific beekeeping, while also enabling farming communities to increase their incomes, saving bee populations that are so vital for our ecological balance, and bringing unprocessed honey to urban consumers.
The Collective goes the extra mile, by sharing the latest knowledge about apiary management practices with its members, to promote sustainable practices. It ensures, for instance, that only 30 per cent of the honey produced by a bee colony is extracted for bottling, leaving the remaining 70 per cent for the sustenance of the bees and their broods. It is also in the process of developing an action plan, in collaboration with local beekeepers and apiarists, to revive the traditional beekeeping practice of maintaining a ‘dhalooni’ for beehives on the thick, stone-and-mud-walled homes typical of the region.
The bees make honey from the flowers of litchi, acacia and chichiri, and the bee-keepers extract raw honey as it exists in the hive. This is how the Collective’s website explains the process: “When honey is collected from a hive, it exists as a thick (sometimes not so thick), sticky liquid that has been packed into the waxy hexagonal boxes that make up a honeycomb. Honey is extracted by uncapping the sealed wax chambers and squeezing out the honey by hand, or in an extractor, and straining the liquid through a mesh or loosely woven cloth. At this point, the honey is ready to be eaten – though it contains tiny substances such as bee pollen, fragments of honeycomb and hive debris, all of which are safe to consume and bring significant health benefits (provided you are not allergic!).”
On the benefits of raw, unpasteurised honey, the Collective’s website notes: “[It] preserves all elements of the honey harvested, including pollen, enzymes and antibodies. It is the essence of the characteristics of the plant, which has synthesized these elements from the soil, water, the air and the sun.
“With the exception of children below two years of age and those who are specifically prone to pollen allergy, the honey comes loaded with benefits that largely mitigate common illnesses like the flu and help improve immunity in the long term.”
The backstory of the Tenacious Bee Collective aligns with what We The Chefs stands for – sustainable eating based on locally sourced seasonal ingredients. And in the spirit of its promise to enable its guests to #tastethestory, We The Chefs laid out a grazing table that did just that. Here’s the menu where the honey used was entirely from the Tenacious Bee Collective:
- Cheese Platter
- Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Honey Drizzle
- Roasted Beetroot with Honey Ginger Yoghurt Dip
- Grilled Pears on sticks with Feta Cheese, Aragula, and Balsamic Reduction with Honey
- Quinoa and Raw Mango Salad with Honey Mustard Dressing
- Kale, Green Apple and Feta Salad with Honey Granola
- Honey Glazed Chicken
- Sourdough Bread