Ingredient

Honey

Honey is not a drop-in replacement for sugar. It is sweeter, wetter, more acidic and browns considerably faster, and every one of those changes what happens in the oven.

Substituting honey for sugar

Four differences matter, and together they are why a straight swap disappoints.

Honey is sweeter than sugar for the same weight, so use roughly three-quarters as much. It is wet — around 17% water — so reduce the other liquid in the recipe by a couple of tablespoons per 100g of honey used. It is acidic, so it reacts with bicarbonate of soda, which means you may need a pinch of bicarbonate even where the original recipe had none. And it browns much faster, because the sugars in it are of a kind that brown at lower temperatures, so drop the oven by around 15°C and watch it.

What you gain is moisture — honey keeps a cake soft for days longer than sugar does — and a flavour that is genuinely different rather than just sweet.

Why it crystallises, and what to do

Honey is a supersaturated sugar solution: it holds more sugar than the water in it can really dissolve. That is an unstable state, so over time some of the sugar comes out as crystals and the honey turns opaque and grainy.

It is not spoilage, and it is not a sign of poor quality — if anything the reverse, since heavily filtered and pasteurised honey crystallises more slowly. Different honeys crystallise at very different rates depending on which sugars dominate: oilseed rape honey sets within weeks, acacia honey can stay liquid for years.

To reverse it, stand the jar in warm — not hot — water and stir until it clears. Do not boil it, and do not microwave it hard: strong heat destroys the aromatics and the enzymes that make good honey interesting, leaving you with expensive syrup.

The kinds

Blossom or wildflower

Whatever the bees found. Mild, variable, inexpensive. Perfectly good for cooking.

Acacia

Very pale, mild, floral, stays liquid a long time. Good where you do not want the honey to dominate.

Orange blossom

Citrusy and light. Excellent with cheese and in dressings.

Heather

Thick, jelly-like, strong and slightly bitter. A honey to be tasted rather than baked with.

Buckwheat

Dark, malty, almost molasses-like. Robust enough for gingerbread and barbecue.

Manuka

Sold on the basis of claimed medicinal properties, at a very high price. FoodHQ makes no health claims about it; as an ingredient it is a strong, earthy, expensive honey.

Using it well

• Add it late to hot pans. Its aromatics are volatile and the sugars burn readily; a honey glaze goes on for the last few minutes, not the first.
• Warm the spoon or oil it and honey slides off cleanly instead of clinging.
• Weigh it rather than measuring by spoon — it is dense and a tablespoon carries more than you think.
• In dressings, it is an emulsifier as well as a sweetener and helps oil and vinegar hold together.
• With cheese, chilli and vinegar, all of which it balances.
• Never give honey to a child under one year old. This is one of the few genuinely non-negotiable safety rules attached to a common ingredient, because of the risk of infant botulism. The Food Standards Agency and the NHS publish the guidance.

Common questions