HIGH COUNTRY SUPERLATIVES

Patience, they say, is a virtue. Certainly it is when it comes to making crumpets. As Beechworth Honey’s CEO Sara Quon explains, the secret to cooking a great crumpet is low and slow. If you want those amazing little tunnels to soak up the gooey, buttery, honey-laden deliciousness that elevates a crumpet into a culinary masterpiece, you can’t rush it. You need the little air bubbles to work their way up through the batter until eventually they pop. It takes a good four to five minutes for that to happen. Anything less and you’ll just have a ring of batter that’s burnt on one side and gloopy in the middle.

Sara takes the time to impart this homespun wisdom at the Bee School, an education centre and cooking school at Beechworth Honey HQ in a former bank building in the centre of the remarkably well-preserved goldrush town. As well as providing visitors with a venue for learning about the inner workings of a hive and the importance of pollinators to the future of agriculture and bio-security, the Bee School is home to the Lost Arts series of cooking and craft classes, where you can learn everything