Hot Honey Recipe: How to Make It Properly at Home

Domino's put hot honey on a pizza. KFC built a burger around it. You can now pick up a jar in Aldi or Asda. In about eighteen months hot honey has gone from a New York pizzeria trick to a British supermarket staple, and the obvious next question is whether you can just make it yourself.

You can. Two ingredients, ten minutes, one pan. The harder question is why homemade hot honey tastes thin next to a proper bottle, and that comes down to three things nearly every hot honey recipe online gets wrong.

We have tasted a few hundred bottles building our range, so this is written from the other side of the counter. If you want the background first, we covered what hot honey actually is separately. This is the recipe.

What you need

Makes roughly 340g, about one standard jar.

• 340g runny honey, blossom or acacia
• 1 to 2 tbsp dried chilli flakes, or 2 to 3 fresh chillies, sliced
• 1 tsp cider vinegar
• A good pinch of salt

Two notes on the honey. Use a decent runny supermarket honey, not your expensive raw jar. Heat destroys the enzymes and delicate aromatics you paid extra for, so raw honey in a hot honey recipe is money burnt. And avoid set honey, or you will spend longer getting it liquid than you spend making the sauce.

On chillies: dried flakes give you clean, consistent heat and a jar that keeps. Fresh chillies give you brighter, fruitier flavour and a much shorter life. Scotch bonnets are the easiest serious heat to find in a UK supermarket and bring real fruitiness with them. Habaneros are the classic if your greengrocer has them. Red bird's eye works fine and is in every Tesco in the country.

How to make hot honey, step by step

1. Warm the honey gently in a small pan on a low heat, until it loosens and moves easily. You want warm, not hot. If it starts to bubble, you have gone too far.
2. Take it off the heat. Stir in the chilli, the vinegar and the salt.
3. Leave it to steep for at least 30 minutes. An hour is better. The longer it sits, the more heat moves into the honey.
4. Taste it. Not hot enough? Warm it gently again and give it another 30 minutes with the chilli still in.
5. Strain through a sieve for a clean pour, or leave the flakes in if you like the look and don't mind the texture.

That is the whole thing.

The three things that go wrong with most hot honey recipes

You boiled it

This is the big one. Push honey much past 70C and it starts shedding the volatile aromatics that make it taste of anything, leaving you with something sweet and flat. Overheated honey also crystallises faster in the jar. Warm it just enough to loosen it, then pull it off the heat. The steeping does the work, not the heat.

You used fresh chillies and kept it in the cupboard

Fresh chillies bring water into the jar, and water is the reason honey stops being the hostile little environment that lets it sit on a shelf for years. A fresh-chilli hot honey belongs in the fridge and wants eating within a fortnight. If you want a jar that lives in the cupboard, use dried flakes. This is the advice most hot honey recipes leave out, and it is the one that actually matters.

You skipped the acid

A teaspoon of cider vinegar does three jobs. It cuts the sweetness so the sauce reads as a condiment rather than a pudding topping. It keeps the honey pourable straight from the fridge. And it drops the pH, which quietly helps on the preservation side. Leave it out and you get hot honey. Put it in and you get something closer to the bottled stuff.

How long it keeps

• Dried chilli flakes only: months in a sealed jar in the cupboard.
• Fresh chilli: two weeks in the fridge, no arguments.
• Crystallised? That is normal honey behaviour, not a fault. Stand the jar in a bowl of warm water for ten minutes.

What to put it on

Pizza is the obvious one, and the reason the whole thing took off. After that:

• Halloumi, grilled hard and drizzled while it still squeaks. Around 1,400 people a month in the UK search for hot honey halloumi, which tells you how fast that one caught on.
• Fried chicken, brushed on straight out of the fryer so it clings to the crust.
• Roast carrots or sprouts, in the last five minutes, so the honey caramelises.
• Blue cheese on a board. The funk and the sweet heat do something neither manages alone.
• A whisky sour, a tablespoon stirred into the syrup.

When to just buy a bottle

Homemade hot honey is genuinely good and costs about four quid a jar. What it will not do is match a small-batch producer for depth, because they are fermenting chillies, blending varieties and ageing the infusion in ways that are not worth your Tuesday evening.

If you want something to measure yours against, Pure Buzzin by Belly Of The Beast (£7) is properly punchy and a fair benchmark for what a home version is aiming at. The rest of the range is in our hot honey collection.

Make a jar first. Then taste it against a bottle, and you will know exactly which one you want on the pizza.