Baking with Honey: Sweet, Sticky, and Tricky

Inside: Baking with honey takes a little planning to get good results. This article explains many differences between plain sugar and liquid honey.

Cooking with honey is popular. Now more than ever, cooks are sneaking a gobbet of honey into recipes from salads to desserts. Some search for richer or fresher flavors, while others prize honey for its nutrients, a step beyond refined sugar.

The unintended consequences of cooking with honey

During home-canning season about 15 years ago, I prepared an oversized batch of homemade barbecue sauce. The recipe called for a generous dollop of buckwheat honey, tomato sauce, vinegar, hot sauce, and a miscellany of spices and herbs.

An oppressive August heat filled the kitchen as I monitored the bubbling pot. All the while, my industrial-size range hood worked full tilt, drawing the luscious-smelling vapor through a long duct in the attic to a fan at the far side of the house.

As I prepared jars and lids and labels, I began noticing honey bees zipping around the trees in the front yard, dashing about like vultures at a road kill. For a while I watched through the windows, wondering what the bees had discovered so near the house and why they seemed manic about the roof.

When finally the kitchen work fell under control, I walked outside and circled the house, trying to solve the mystery. Then I saw it. High up, just below the roof peak, the outlet from the kitchen fan shone black with bees clasping onto the metal grid, struggling against the breeze that delivered the delectable aroma of buckwheat honey. That magnificent scent, unexpected during a summer dearth, lured bees like a magnet draws thumbtacks. Although they darted and dipped, circled and swerved, they never lost focus or strayed from their quarry until nightfall.

Baking with honey is a unique skill

Although many honey-lovers have good intentions, learning to cook with honey can be tricky, or even disappointing. Yet most of the time, it’s simple. Like my barbecue sauce, you toss in the ingredients and cook until done: When it tastes right, it is right. This includes marinades, sauces, dressings, candied nuts, ice cream, and many types of desserts. You add, mix, and taste until it suits you, and if you’re careful, you won’t draw bees from miles around.

Conversely, baking with honey is anything but simple. If you choose a recipe designed for honey, you should have no problem. In those recipes, the authors have calculated the vexing parts for you. They have considered the vagaries of acidity, sweetness, oven temperatures, and cook times in advance. Just follow the directions and presto — all the honey cakes, honey cookies, and honey buns you can eat.

However, the real challenge of baking with honey comes when you try to convert a favorite recipe, a tried-and-true winner, into one that replaces sugar with honey. Without careful calculation, a quick substitution can ruin a batch of your favorite bake.

Differences between honey and sugar

Most of today’s baking ingredients are reliably uniform. Sugar, flour, butter, and milk come with variations, but most brands won’t ruin a recipe. On the other hand, honey is anything but predictable, exhibiting large swings in texture, color, pH, and flavor. Let’s take a look at some of the differences and how each can affect your baked goods.

Honey is sweeter than sugar

Measure for measure, honey is sweeter than table sugar (sucrose). This is because fructose, a major component of honey, is the sweetest of all the natural carbohydrates, having nearly twice the sweetness of sucrose. Honey is roughly 40 percent fructose and 30 percent glucose, which makes it (on average) about 1.5 times as sweet as table sugar (glucose and sucrose have similar sweetness levels). However, because the amount of fructose varies from one batch of honey to another, we can only rely on estimates of sweetness.

If you want your recipe to be no sweeter than it already is, you can try substituting only part of the sugar with honey, maybe a quarter or a third. However, deciding how much to substitute is no simple task, and your decision may come down to personal preference.

Honey contains water

Honey is usually a liquid, whereas table sugar is a solid. That means you must estimate the amount of liquid in your honey and subtract that measure from some other liquid in your recipe. Many bakers estimate a measure of honey to be 80 percent sugar and 20 percent water. So if you wanted to replace exactly a cup of sugar in a recipe, you would need to add 1.25 cups of honey and subtract about 0.25 cups of liquid (20 percent of the 1.25 cups) from the liquid ingredients.

How exact your measurements must be depends on your recipe. In an average home recipe, you rarely need to worry about these adjustments for amounts smaller than a half-cup or so. However, if you are using a large amount of honey in proportion to the dry ingredients, you will need to make adjustments to the liquids. To avoid making your recipe too sweet, first decide on how much sugar you will replace with honey. Then, using that measurement, adjust for the liquid it will add.

Honey is acidic

We routinely bake with an assortment of ingredients that increase the acidity (lower the pH) of dough and batter. Common among these are vinegar, lemon juice, and other fruit and vegetable juices. In addition, things like buttermilk, coffee, chocolate, and brown sugar can acidify the mix. To counterbalance these acidic ingredients, we rely on baking soda.

The pH is important to the final product. In things like cake, acidity can enhance the flavor of other ingredients. Even more important, acidic ingredients can loosen the structure of both proteins and starches, which in moderation can assist with both leavening and tenderizing, but in excess can cause a total loss of structure. The pH affects even the appearance of baked goods because excess acidity can reduce browning, yielding pale, anemic-looking results.

Generations of bakers have developed recipes to perfectly adjust the pH. But the addition of honey tosses a monkey wrench into these best-laid plans. Depending on its source, honey can be very or only marginally acidic, ranging in pH from about 3.4 to 6.1. Very often, honey adds enough extra acidity that you need to compensate for it, if possible. However, since the components of honey are always variable, you may get different results from different batches.

Browning and the Maillard reaction

A complicated sequence of events in food chemistry called the Maillard reaction is partially responsible for the luscious taste and color of crusty bread, browned biscuits, and French fries.¹ It also causes the deliciously charred flavor of grilled burgers, seared steaks, toasted marshmallows, and toffee, not to mention the rich flavor of dark coffee and dark chocolate.

The series of Maillard reactions occurs between two types of molecules — amino acids and reducing sugars — in the presence of high heat. A reducing sugar is a simple sugar such as glucose, fructose, maltose, and lactose, all of which can donate electrons to the amino acids, causing those succulent flavors to form. In most kinds of dough and batter, the reducing sugars react with the proteins or amino acids found in flour.

However, not all sugars can donate electrons. Sucrose, for example, is a non-reducing sugar until heat or enzymes break it into fructose and glucose. That means a recipe containing a reducing sugar such as fructose can brown much faster than one with only sucrose. Without a reducing sugar readily available, additional heat (and often additional time) is required to break the sucrose into simple sugars before the Maillard reaction can begin.

The reducing sugars in honey

Although Maillard browning typically occurs quickly under the high heat of baking, it can also occur very slowly over long periods of cool temperatures. A good example of slow browning occurs in stored honey. As we have all seen, honey gets darker with age, sometimes going from amber to brown to nearly black, even if it was never heated.

Nectar contains various amounts of fructose, glucose, sucrose, maltose, and other sugars. Although honey bees don’t use high heat, they have a reliable fix for sucrose. When they collect nectar, they add saliva that contains invertase. The invertase “inverts” or changes the complex sucrose into glucose and fructose. By the time the nectar gets stored as honey, most of the sucrose has been transformed into simple reducing sugars.

Slowly, these reducing sugars come into contact with amino acids in the honey. Although variable in type and number, the amino acids come mainly from pollen but also from various phytochemicals. Over time, the amino acids react with the reducing sugars, stimulating the Maillard reaction. This reaction — which may take years — slowly turns the honey darker and adds a rich buttery flavor.

Why pH matters in baking

The Maillard reaction occurs faster in foods with an elevated pH of around 6 to 10. But the ingredients in baked goods are often more acetic than that, so we rely on baking soda to speed things along.

Because a higher pH is so effective at stimulating the Maillard reaction, baking soda is nearly universal in recipes for baked goods. Without it, the Maillard reaction would be sluggish, yielding baked goods without browning or enticing flavors and aromas.

You can attempt to compensate for the acidity of honey by adding a small amount of baking soda to your recipe. For a standard household-size recipe containing 2 to 3 cups of flour, try adding an extra quarter teaspoon of baking soda to the dry ingredients.

Caramelization vs Maillard browning

Although we often use the terms caramelization and browning interchangeably, they are different processes.² Whereas Maillard browning requires both reducing sugars and amino acids, caramelization only requires sugar. Even more confusing, they can occur simultaneously in the same recipe.

Caramelization also occurs when sugar meets high heat, but simple sugars caramelize much faster than sucrose. According to the Science of Cooking website, fructose begins to caramelize at 230⁰F, while sucrose doesn’t begin until 320. That means, in a high fructose, high heat environment (like a recipe with lots of honey) browning can quickly proceed too fast and too far. For this reason, you will often be told to reduce the oven temperature by 25 degrees when your recipe contains lots of fructose, as does honey.

This may seem complex, and it is. You want the Maillard reaction to promote browning, so you increase the pH. But you don’t want the fructose to burn, so you lower the baking temperature.

The wild flavors of honey

As you know, honey is flavorful, adding nuanced notes and delicate flavors. But not all flavors may be right for your family. During the world wars, home cooks commonly replaced rationed white sugar with honey in home canning recipes. You can still find accounts of the “horrible” or “absolutely disgusting” flavors this substitution produced. Years ago, I heard some of my Appalachian relatives say they could never eat honey again after several winters of consuming honey-canned fruit.

The point is simple: The taste of honey can be overpowering. If you are trying to convert a recipe from granulated sugar to honey, proceed with caution, start with small quantities, and use light-colored honey, which is usually less shocking in flavor.

Another honey trap

Okay, here’s another Donnybrook for the home baker to navigate. Recall that honey is sold by weight, not volume. On average, a one-pound jar of honey yields about 11 fluid ounces.³

Conversely, recipes designed for the home baker usually give measurements in fluid ounces. Teaspoons, tablespoons, or even cups are common measurements for honey in a recipe. On average, 1 fluid ounce of honey (2 tablespoons) weighs about 1.5 ounces, so don’t assume your 16-ounce jar of honey contains 2 cups. Read your recipe carefully and convert as necessary.

Concerns with hydroxymethylfurfural

Some people shy away from cooking with honey to avoid consuming hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF).⁴ Although once suspected of causing cancer in humans, recent studies have yielded negative results. Still, questions exist.

HMF, sometimes written as 5-(hydroxymethyl) furfural, can form in any sugar-laden food, especially after heating or drying. It’s caused by both the Maillard reaction and caramelization, as well as long-term storage. It is common in baked goods, roasted coffee, dried fruit, dark beer, sweet wines, jams, vinegar, and honey.

Some honey organizations use HMF as a marker to determine whether honey has been overheated during processing. Newly cured honey is very low in HMF, measuring about 15 mg/kg. But the amount increases over time or with heat treatments. Guidelines suggest temperate-region honeys should contain less than 40 mg/kg, and tropical honeys should contain less than 80 mg/kg. In comparison, a spectacular producer of HMF, dried plums, can yield as much as 2200 mg/kg.

Common baking recommendations

If you find all these complications off-putting, you are not alone. I love to bake and churn out a yummy array of creations. However, I do not like to fail, so I shy away from honey as a baking ingredient unless someone else develops a recipe specifically for honey. I do use honey in breads or other baked goods where it’s only a tiny portion of the recipe. But for tricky cakes and pastries, I stick to plain refined sugar and maybe add a honey glaze or topping. Yes, I’m cautious.

But if you are more adventurous, you can find many recommendations for converting a recipe from sugar to honey. But baker beware: Many times general rules such as “subtract a quarter-cup of water from your recipe” don’t discuss the size of the original recipe. Always look for proportional instructions, such as “subtract a quarter-cup of water for every cup of honey.” Whatever the instruction, be sure it makes sense to you.

If you’re just starting to bake with honey, I recommend a visit to The National Honey Board website.⁵ It contains lots of helpful advice, including proportional instructions for substituting honey in your recipe. It also features a selection of honey-designed recipes that remove the guesswork — a great place to start.

Rusty Burlew
Honey Bee Suite

Notes and References

1. Science Direct: The Maillard reaction (MR) is defined as an array of non-enzymatic, consecutive and parallel chemical reactions that supervises both food quality and safety. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/maillard-reaction

2. Science of Cooking: What is Caramelization?https://www.scienceofcooking.com/caramelization.htm

3. Or, as an AI chatbot assured me, “a pound of honey weighs 11 fluid ounces.”

4. Abraham, K., Gürtler, R., Berg, K., Heinemeyer, G., Lampen, A., & Appel, K. E. (2011). Toxicology and risk assessment of 5-Hydroxymethylfurfural in food. Molecular Nutrition & Food Research, 55(5), 667-678. https://doi.org/10.1002/mnfr.201000564

5. The National Honey Board: Find a Recipe. https://honey.com/recipes

About Me

I backed my love of bee science with a bachelor’s degree in Agronomic Crops and a master’s in Environmental Studies. I write extensively about bees, including a current column in American Bee Journal and past columns in Two Million Blossoms and Bee Craft. I’ve endured multiple courses in melittology and made extensive identifications of North American bees for iNaturalist and other organizations. My master beekeeper certificate issued from U Montana. I’m also an English nerd. More here.