Honey — A Wonderful Sweetener

My husband recently harvested his 2020 Wildflower honey. It is very interesting to note the different flavors when compared to his 2019 honey as this year with its drought led to the bees feasting on different flowers/plants. (If you want to taste them or purchase any great local Colorado Wildflower honey, let me know.) I am getting ready to teach a class at Hudson Gardens on how to use honey in your cooking/baking and I thought you might enjoy reading this Cooking Tip that I first wrote last year.

Honey is a delightful sweetener and is lovely to have in your arsenal. Because honey attracts and holds water, it can add great moisture to your baked goods. It can also act as a binder and thickener for sauces, dressings, marinades and dips.

There are, however, some cautions about cooking with honey. You cannot make a 1-to-1 swap from your recipe’s current sweetener (such as granulated sugar) to honey.  With so many wonderful recipes that were created with honey as an ingredient, I encourage you just to find this type of recipe. Someone has already done all the experimentation to come up with the right mix and amount of ingredients.

If you would like to convert a recipe from its current sugar to honey, here are some guidelines.

• Begin by substituting only half of the amount of sugar in the recipe with honey. You might be able to up this as you continue experimenting but if you do it all at once, your recipe is likely to fail.
• Because honey is a liquid sweetener, reduce the liquid in your recipe by ¼ cup for each cup of honey used.
• In cookie recipes where the only liquid is eggs, increase the flour by 2 tablespoons per cup of honey.
• Honey is an acidic ingredient. Therefore, add about ½ teaspoon baking soda for each cup of honey used.
• Reduce your oven temperature by 25-75° to prevent over-browning as honey browns faster than sugar.
• Choose your honey carefully. Very strongly flavored honeys should be used judiciously and are best in items such as spice cakes, spicy marinades and glazes (jerk spice, spare ribs, BBQ sauce). For a lighter dish, choose a lighter honey.

One wonderful characteristic of honey is that it is its own preservative. Therefore, it keeps for years although the flavor is best within a year of harvesting.

Store it at room temperature in your pantry. If you put honey in the refrigerator, it accelerates crystallization. Speaking of that somewhat irritating aspect of honey, what do you do with your honey when it has crystallized? Do not throw it away; it is not an indicator of spoilage, impurity, age or quality. Rather, it is a natural process that occurs when the glucose molecules align into orderly arrangements known as crystals.

You can reverse crystallization by any of the following methods.

• Bring a pan of water to a boil, turn off the heat, place the honey container in the water with cap open & leave until both have cooled and the crystals have dissolved.
• Microwave it in 10-second increments until the crystals dissolve.
• For a more permanent solution, you can add corn syrup (assuming you have no objections to this ingredient). Because crystallization can only occur if all the sugar molecules are of the same structure, by adding something different (such as corn syrup), it will not crystallize. You do not need much – stir in 2 teaspoons of corn syrup per cup of honey.

Honey is such a wonderful ingredient and I would suspect we all have some in the pantry. It is great to spread on your bread or drizzle in your oatmeal. It is also an ingredient that has so much more to offer. Go someplace where you can taste all the different varieties, choose what you enjoy and have fun!