Mind your beeswax...

Here’s an update on cooking with beeswax. I managed to buy some beeswax from a farmers’ market recently and I can now report back that it is amazing to cook with.  It really made the crust of my canelés so much crisper and nicer.

natural beeswax

Beeswax is a clean and natural product made by bees as a ‘storage’ container for their honey production. It is indigestible by humans (but it is safe to eat – hence it’s often eaten as honeycomb) so, unlike cooking with other fats and oils, it adds no calories or cholesterol to food, which is a nice bonus!

There are fantastic advantages to cooking using beeswax, and you can use it for both sweet and savoury cooking.  Beeswax does not have a strong smell and is more stable to heat than fats and oils, however, if it does burn then it decomposes cleanly.  Simply melt beeswax and use, as you could use a fat or oil, to make frying pans, oven trays, wok, or other cooking surfaces non-stick.

For greasing canelé moulds, you need to make a mixture that’s called ‘white oil’ and then use this to grease the moulds. To make ‘white oil’: place 30g beeswax in a heatproof glass measuring cup; microwave to melt, and while still warm, gradually stir in enough grape seed oil to make a white coloured mixture that’s runny enough to coat the back of a spoon. Cool to room temperature; store in the glass container at room temperature.  To coat pre-seasoned canelé moulds with white oil: brush dabs of warmed oil to evenly coat the interior of the moulds, and shake out excess.

Canelé made using beeswax to grease copper moulds

My recipe for Canele is up on My Recipe page of this blog. Happy baking my friends!