Sauces honey
Balancing acid and adding body without turning a savoury sauce into a dessert.
19 honeys · culinary use
Honeys in this group
- Clover honeyExtra white · MildWarm, mild and rounded — sweet with a faint cinnamon-and-hay note underneath. The taste most English-speaking readers picture when they read the word honey.
- Wildflower honeyExtra white · ModerateVaries with the season and the landscape. Pale spring crops are floral and light; late-summer crops darker, fruitier and stronger.
- Alfalfa honeyExtra white · MildMild, clean and slightly grassy, with a beeswax note and very little else. A background honey, and good at being one.
- Saw palmetto honeyLight amber · PronouncedSmoky and peppery with a warm resinous depth — an unusual and slightly savoury honey that divides opinion sharply.
- Mesquite honeyExtra white · MildMild and smooth with a faint smoky-molasses note that arrives after the sweetness rather than with it.
- Mustard honeyExtra white · MildVery sweet and very mild with a faint pungent brassica note when fresh, fading to clean blandness as it ages and sets.
- Cranberry honeyLight amber · ModerateTart and fruity with a genuine cranberry acidity — one of very few honeys where sourness is a real part of the profile.
- Cotton honeyExtra white · MildMild and clean with a faint green-vegetal note and very little else — a background honey.
- Rubber tree honeyLight amber · MildMild and slightly vegetal with a light caramel warmth — an unremarkable flavour attached to a genuinely remarkable production story.
- Cabbage palm honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, smoky and savoury with a mineral saltiness and only moderate sweetness — an unusual and polarising honey.
- Buckwheat honeyDark amber · IntenseMalt, molasses and wet straw, with a savoury, almost animal depth. The most polarising honey in general production.
- Chestnut honeyAmber · IntenseAromatic, woody and unmistakably bitter — sweetness first, tannin second, and a long dry finish.
- Avocado honeyDark amber · IntenseDark, buttery and molasses-rich with a savoury, almost salty edge. Nothing about it suggests the fruit.
- Oak honeydew honeyDark amber · IntenseEarthy, salty and barely sweet, with a bitter-mineral depth and a finish more like a stock or a yeast extract than a sweetener.
- Tualang honeyAmber · IntenseSharply sour and dark, with a fermented-fruit tang over a molasses base — genuinely unlike any temperate honey, and an acquired taste.
- Carob honeyAmber · IntenseDark, malty and distinctly savoury with a fermented, almost cheesy note that people either find fascinating or cannot get past.
- Coriander honeyLight amber · PronouncedWarm and spicy with an unmistakable coriander-seed aroma over a caramel base — one of the most immediately recognisable honeys there is.
- Tamarind honeyLight amber · ModerateAmber, warm and distinctly tart, with a caramel body and a sour-fruit edge that does echo the tamarind pod.
- Carrot seed honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, savoury and faintly medicinal, with a green umbellifer note and a slightly bitter finish. A challenging honey and an interesting one.
Plants behind these honeys
- White cloverTrifolium repensOne of the very few plants that is both a top-tier nectar source and a substantial pollen source, over a long season, at landscape scale.
- Wild carrotDaucus carotaModerate nectar and good pollen, in the most accessible form available — its value is the breadth of the visitor list rather than the volume.
- HawthornCrataegus monogyna
- BrambleRubus fruticosusThe combination of a very long season, high nectar value and reliability in variable weather makes bramble the workhorse of northern European summer forage.
- IvyHedera helixOne of the very few plants that is top-rated for both nectar and pollen, and it delivers them when the year's other options have finished. For overwintering insects this is decisive.
- AppleMalus domesticaValuable spring forage, but rarely a surplus crop: the window is short and the colony is still building at that point in the year, so most of what comes in is eaten immediately.
- AlfalfaMedicago sativaExcellent forage on paper, and the tripping mechanism complicates it in practice: a honey bee robbing nectar from the side of the flower collects no pollen and delivers none.
- Saw palmettoSerenoa repensA heavy spring nectar and pollen source across a very large area.
Guides covering these honeys
- Why honeys taste and look so differentEvery honey is around 80% sugar. Everything that distinguishes one from another lives in the remaining fifth.
- Honey authenticity, adulteration and testingHoney is among the most adulterated foods in world trade. The tests are good, the evasions are better funded, and almost every home test circulating online does not work.
- Raw, filtered and processed honeyWhat actually happens between the hive and the jar, which of it changes the honey, and why the word 'raw' carries less information than it appears to.
- Creamed, set and whipped honeyCreamed honey has nothing added and nothing whipped into it. It is ordinary honey whose crystallisation has been controlled instead of left to chance, and the technique is a hundred years old.
- Why honey comes in different coloursHoney runs from nearly colourless to almost black, and the colour is set mainly by the plant. It correlates loosely with intensity, more strongly with mineral content, and not at all with quality.
- What is honey?Honey is nectar that bees have concentrated and chemically altered, then sealed in wax. Every property people notice about it — the sweetness, the keeping quality, the setting — follows from that process.
Other culinary use groups
Narrow it down further
- Honey finder
Which honey should I buy for what I actually want to do with it?
- Flavour selector
I like this taste — which honeys have it?
- Honey comparison
How do these honeys actually differ, beyond colour?
- Honey substitute calculator
How much honey do I use instead of sugar, and what else has to change?
- Storage guide
How should I store honey, and what do I do when it sets?