Hot Honey

This easy hot honey recipe takes just 10 minutes and uses only two ingredients, with an optional splash of vinegar to brighten the flavor. Whether you like mild or fiery heat, this recipe is fully adjustable to your taste.

Like it hot? Try these: dill pickle hot sauce, mango habanero hot sauce & sriracha salt

We're in our fourth year of beekeeping, and if you've never heard of "bee math," it goes like this: you start with a couple of hives… and suddenly you're swimming in honey. What began as 50 pounds in our first season quickly turned into 150, then over 250 pounds by the third year.

Working with that much honey changes how you cook with it. You learn quickly how heat affects flavor, why moisture matters for shelf life, and how different honeys behave in recipes.

This homemade hot honey recipe is dedicated to bee math.

What Is Hot Honey?

Hot honey, sometimes called spicy honey, is a simple infused honey recipe made by gently heating honey with dried chili peppers or chili flakes to create a sweet and spicy condiment. The heat doesn’t hit all at once, the sweetness lands first followed by the spice, which is exactly what makes it so addictive.

It’s not a sauce and it’s not a glaze, though it works brilliantly as both. Use it as a hot honey glaze on roasted proteins or a hot honey sauce drizzled across fresh pizza.

Hot honey has been around Southern kitchens for generations, but it became a mainstream obsession when Mike’s Hot Honey had a viral moment in 2022.

The good news: homemade hot honey is better than any bottle you can buy, costs a fraction of the price, requires only simple ingredients, and takes about ten minutes start to finish.

Key Ingredients

Honey: I’m using hyper-local raw honey, as in straight from my backyard, but I do recommend raw honey for hot honey whenever possible, because it has a more complex flavor profile and it is believed that local honey actually has health benefits!

Dried Peppers: For this batch of hot honey, I’m using dehydrated Red Flame peppers from my garden, but you can use pretty much any dried peppers or even crushed red pepper flakes! Red Flame peppers are a cayenne variety, with a Scoville rating between 30 and 50,000 SHU. This puts them on par with other cayenne peppers, Chili De Arbol, and some Thai peppers. If you like more kick, try habanero peppers. For less heat, opt for dried jalapenos or poblano peppers.

How To Make Hot Honey

1. Step 1: Add 2 cups of honey and 8-10 coarsely chopped dried peppers with their seeds or 3-4 tablespoons of dried chili flakes to a small heavy bottomed saucepan.

2. Step 2: Heat the mixture on low until barely simmering. It’s important to NOT boil the honey – boiling honey expands rapidly and can make a mess, and at a certain point, boiled honey begins to make candy – which is not what we want all!

3. Step 3: Simmer for 5 minutes, stirring regularly, then sample the honey:
   Spicy enough: move to the next step
   Not spicy enough: add a bit more peppers or pepper flakes and simmer for another 5 minutes before testing again

4. Step 4: Remove honey from heat and allow to cool slightly. Meanwhile, sanitize a storage jar by washing in hot soapy water, rinsing well and drying completely.

5. Step 5: Using a fine mesh strainer, carefully strain the solids out of the warm honey. Honey flows more easily when warm, so don’t allow it to cool too much before straining.

Choosing Your Honey

Since honey is the backbone of this recipe, the type you choose will shape the final flavor more than anything else. Here’s what I’d reach for, and why, from someone who now has more honey than she knows what to do with!

Clover Honey Clover is the most common honey variety in North America and a reliable choice for hot honey. It has a light color, a clean and delicate sweetness, and a mild floral note that doesn’t compete with the pepper heat. Because it doesn’t have a strong personality of its own, the chili flavor gets to be the star. Clover has a moderate-to-high glucose content, which means it does crystallize within a few months, but that’s easy to fix (more on that below).

Canola Honey If you live in the Canadian prairies or northern US, your local honey is likely canola-dominant. Canola honey is nearly clear, very mild, and almost neutral in flavor. It’s sweet without being floral. The catch is that canola honey has one of the highest glucose-to-fructose ratios of any common variety, which means it crystallizes quickly, sometimes even in the hive before extracting. It will almost certainly solidify in your jar before you finish the bottle. This is not a problem; it’s actually a great reason to use it in this recipe. The gentle heat during the infusion step liquefies the crystals completely, and the finished hot honey stores well at room temperature.

Wildflower Honey Wildflower honey is produced by bees foraging from multiple flower species, which means the flavor varies by season, by region, and honestly by hive. It tends to be darker in color with a deeper, more complex flavor, sometimes fruity, sometimes earthy, sometimes almost caramel-like. It pairs beautifully with spicy peppers because the depth of flavor can hold its own. The crystallization timeline on wildflower honey is unpredictable because it depends on which flowers your bees visited, but it generally stays liquid longer than clover or canola.

Raw vs. Pasteurized Raw honey is minimally processed, it goes straight from the hive into the jar with only coarse filtering to remove wax and debris. It retains its natural enzymes, pollen, antioxidants, and full flavor profile. It also has a more distinct, complex taste that varies noticeably by floral source. The potential downside is that raw honey crystallizes faster, because all those natural particles (pollen, micro-crystals, bits of wax) give glucose molecules something to anchor to and organize around.

Pasteurized honey is heated and then rapidly cooled during processing. This kills wild yeasts, dissolves any existing crystals, and results in a product that stays liquid on store shelves much longer. The tradeoff is a milder, more uniform flavor and the loss of heat-sensitive enzymes and some antioxidants.

Here’s the beekeeper’s take: if you’re going to heat your honey during the infusion process anyway, some of raw honey’s heat-sensitive benefits are reduced regardless. That said, raw honey still has a more interesting flavor before you heat it, and the flavor depth carries into the finished product. I use my own raw wildflower honey and wouldn’t change it. But if all you have is a pasteurized clover honey from the grocery store, your hot honey will still be delicious.

The best honey is local honey. Wherever you are, buying from a local beekeeper means fresher honey, more variety, and the satisfaction of supporting your local economy.

Choosing Your Peppers

Every pepper variety has its own flavor profile and heat level. Here are some commonly available peppers:

Should I Add Apple Cider Vinegar?

I prefer to make honey honey without vinegar, but you certainly can, and many do!

Apple cider vinegar is acidic, and that acidity does a few important jobs for your tastebuds. It cuts through the sweetness, which is substantial because honey is very sweet and concentrated. It provides a brightness that lifts the overall flavor without you being able to identify “I taste vinegar”, it just makes everything taste more vibrant. And the mild sourness from the vinegar actually counteracts and balances the heat from the peppers, making the spice feel cleaner and more pleasant rather than just hot.

How much to use: Start with 1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar per cup of honey. Add it off the heat, after straining, and stir it in while the honey is still warm. Taste, and add a touch more if needed.

Hot Honey FAQs

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