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Baking and cooking with honey: tips and a little gingerbread history

In the kitchen, honey is much more than a sweetener: it adds flavour, colour and a sticky, glossy glaze. But it behaves differently from sugar – once you know how, your honey bakes and dishes will turn out every time.

Using honey instead of sugar

Honey is about 17% water and slightly acidic. By weight, use roughly the same amount of honey as sugar: about 100 g of honey instead of 100 g of sugar. (The “three-quarters of a cup” rule in American recipes is by volume – honey is denser, so in grams it would mean more honey.) Reduce the liquid in the dough by about a fifth of the weight of the honey, set the oven about 15 °C lower, and if the dough isn’t a yeast dough, a pinch (about 0.5 g) of bicarbonate of soda per 100 g of honey balances out its acidity. For your first try, swap only half of the sugar – or work it out with the sugar-to-honey converter.

Honey browns faster

The sugars in honey caramelise at a lower temperature than granulated sugar. That’s a bonus for roast vegetables and glazes, but with cakes and biscuits you need to keep an eye on it. That’s why the honey glaze only goes onto the honey mustard chicken thighs and the honey-glazed spare ribs in the last few minutes, and why you need to stay by the oven while the sheets for the mézes krémes (honey cream slice) are baking.

Which honey for what?

From beekeepers’ experience:

For baking, wildflower honey is the first choice: its full flavour comes through in the dough, and it works just as well crystallised, because it melts when heated.
Mild acacia honey suits tea and cold drinks – stir it into tea only once it has cooled to lukewarm, so its aroma is kept too.
Bold chestnut honey is the one for meat, glazes and pumpkin.
For serving, the honey dipper is drip-free.

The Hungarian history of gingerbread

Making mézeskalács (Hungarian honey gingerbread) is an old craft: the first gingerbread makers’ guild in the Kingdom of Hungary was founded in 1619 in Pozsony (today’s Bratislava), and the guilds were abolished in 1872 by the first Industry Act. Decorated gingerbread was pressed into carved wooden moulds, most often made of pear wood. Today gingerbread appears in the local heritage registers of several towns and villages – but the Hungarikum title (the official Hungarian national treasure label) went not to gingerbread but to Hungarian acacia honey.

If you’re in the mood now, here’s the recipe for soft honey gingerbread with no resting time.

One important rule

Never give honey in any form to babies under one year old – not even baked. According to Nébih (the Hungarian National Food Chain Safety Office), this applies regardless of where the honey comes from.