Honey is delicious and versatile on its own, suitable for many healthy drinks and even cocktails. You know how to make honey even better? Add some heat! That’s exactly the idea with honey hot sauce.
As you’ll see, there are two different styles with this sauce. Some recipes and products are basically honey with chili flakes added in. Such versions retain much of the flavor and texture of honey, just with an added spicy kick. These versions can be called honey hot sauce or simply hot honey.
The other style takes inspiration from hot sauce instead. Some versions just use honey as an extra ingredient in hot sauce, while others change some of the ingredients and create their own twists on the idea.
Both styles are delicious and are useful in a variety of situations. Why not try a few of the recipes or products from this list and see which you prefer?
P.S. For another way to make honey enjoyable, why not try fermented garlic honey? This approach adds some savory garlic nuance to your honey, while also providing probiotics from the fermentation.
Delicious Honey Hot Sauce Recipes
Spice-Based Honey Hot Sauce
Our first recipe comes from emilylaurae.com. It’s a five-ingredient recipe that uses honey as the base ingredient, then adds chili flakes, chili powder, sugar, and salt. The inclusion of both chili flakes and chili powder provides more complexity than normal, while the sugar and salt enhance the sweet-hot balance.
Don’t be afraid to vary the type of chili flakes and chili powder. Some will provide you with smokiness, while others kick up the heat instead. You can play around with the quantities too.
Emily also provides a list of serving suggestions, such as using the honey as a dipping sauce, a glaze, drizzling it on charcuterie boards, or even serving it on your pizza.
Three-Ingredient Honey Hot Sauce
Then there’s this recipe from kennethtemple.com. It’s a simpler recipe, with just three ingredients. It also follows a different style than the previous example.
Notably, the recipe doesn’t call for any hot peppers at all. You’re mixing the honey with hot sauce (and adding a decent amount of butter). Still, you could add spices if you wanted. Spices would raise the heat of the sauce and make the flavor profile more complex.
This is a great recipe to experiment with, as the flavor profile will vary depending on the specific honey and hot sauce you use. You could even experiment with a hot sauce subscription box and make a new version of the honey hot sauce every month.
Homemade Honey Hot Sauce
Here’s a second recipe that uses hot sauce as an ingredient. This time it comes from twosleevers.com and features red pepper flakes, apple cider vinegar, hot sauce, and honey.
The apple cider vinegar helps to tone down the intensity of the sauce, which is helpful if you’re sensitive to heat. The vinegar also adds some nuance to the flavor profile.
Urvashi suggests starting with a small amount of hot sauce when you first make the recipe, then increasing the hot sauce content gradually. Doing so ensures that you don’t make the honey too spicy. After all, increasing the spiciness of food is much easier than decreasing it.
Honey Hot Wings
This recipe offers a different take on the topic. It still gives you the details for making honey hot sauce, but you’re also learning a recipe that works wonders with the flavors.
Seriously. Honey hot wings give you an amazing sweet and spicy balance that guests will adore. You can find full details for the wings and the hot sauce over at jessicagarvin.com. If you don’t want to make chicken wings, no worries. Simply focus on the hot sauce section of the article and ignore the rest.
Habanero Honey Hot Sauce
Want a truly flavorful hot sauce? Then this recipe from pepperhead.com is the perfect choice. It stands out from the other recipes on this list, as it is the only one that includes fresh fruit as an ingredient. The fruit adds a whole new dimension to the sauce and makes it much more exciting.
What’s more, the sauce features habaneros as one of the main ingredients. This makes it a particularly spicy sauce, one that’s offset with plenty of sweetness and fruitiness.
Seriously, if you’re only going to try one recipe from the list – this is the one.
Honey Fried Chicken With Hot Honey Sauce
This recipe comes from tasteandtellblog.com. This time you’re getting a recipe for honey fried chicken, plus buttermilk biscuits and honey hot sauce. That’s an entire meal in one go. What could be better?
This honey hot sauce in this recipe is simple. That’s not a bad thing though. Sometimes you need a meal that can be easily pulled together.
Hot Honey Sauce
Arman from thebigmansworld.com is a master at creating delicious and easy to follow recipes. This one is no exception, as there are just three ingredients, yet the finished sauce is better than anything you could buy at the store.
I particularly love how he uses red pepper flakes. These provide plenty of heat while making the sauce look amazing too. You can easily tweak the ratio of honey to pepper to get the best balance of sweetness to heat.
The Best Honey Hot Sauce
Genevieve from twocloveskitchen.com calls this the best honey hot sauce. While that title could easily be debated, there’s no doubt that the sauce itself is delicious.
The recipe also includes some ideas about how to use the sauce, including drizzling it over vanilla ice cream. As strange as it sounds, that combo of honey, spice, and vanilla ice cream could be truly amazing.
Baked Crunchy Hot Honey Chicken
Here’s one more chicken and honey recipe to set you on your way. This one comes from halfbakedharvest.com and features delicious cornflake-crusted chicken.
The chicken is baked on a sheet pan, making it much healthier than any deep fried chicken recipe. You’re not missing out anyway. The flavor profile for this dish should be simply stunning and every bit as good as fried chicken.
Hot Honey Recipe
Our final recipe comes from thishealthytable.com. Emily mentions that the honey tastes particularly good on a toasted baguette with prosciutto and ricotta. Doesn’t that sound like a stunning combination?
Emily also mentions that the type of honey you use makes a big difference. She suggests using a mild honey, like clover honey. This way, you’re not getting too many strong flavors from the honey. That principle applies to most of the recipes on this list.
Honey Hot Sauce Brands
If you don’t want to make honey hot sauce yourself, why not buy it instead? There are some fantastic brands out there. Here are our favorites.
Mike’s Hot Honey
Mike’s Hot Honey is one of the most widely available options. You can even order it on their site and have the sauce shipped anywhere in the United States.
The original version is similar to some of the recipes we’ve featured and uses honey and chili peppers as the main ingredients, along with some vinegar. There are no artificial ingredients or preservatives to worry about, making this a very natural product.
There’s also an extra hot version, which simply relies on honey and chilis. This version is quite a bit spicier, so some caution is required.
Louisiana Brand Hot Sauce Sweet Heat With Honey
Louisiana Brand Hot Sauce has a completely different product. This time we’re talking about regular hot sauce that has been sweetened using honey.
This style means there are a few more ingredients this time, including aged peppers, distilled vinegar, sugar, salt, refinery syrup (whatever that is), and honey. With this ingredient selection, honey is likely to be a background flavor rather than dominating the sauce.
The same brand has many other hot sauces, including both red and green ones. You might want to try a few of these as well.
Savannah Bee Honey Hot Sauce
Here’s another exciting product. It comes from Savannah Bee and can be easily ordered online. The sauce relies on wildflower honey, plus Jamaican scotch bonnet peppers – a combination that is certain to be amazing.
To make thing even easier, Savannah Bee also has a squeezable bottle of hot honey, plus little Hot Honey Fire Sticks. Those fire sticks are basically sealed straws filled with hot honey, which means you can even take the honey with you on the go.
Rocky’s Honey Hot Sauce
Finally, we have Rocky’s Honey Hot Sauce. It’s not a particularly well-known brand, but don’t let that put you off.
This is another product that uses hot sauce as the base ingredient. There’s Worcestershire sauce too, along with butter, some seasonings, honey, and cayenne flavor.
There are a lot of flavors going on in this sauce, so the honey won’t stand out dramatically. But, you’ll still get that amazing sweet-sour balance.
How Do You Use Honey Hot Sauce?
So, now you have your honey hot sauce, what do you do with it? The answer is influenced by the type of sauce we’re talking about.
If the recipe focuses on hot sauce, then you can use it just like you would regular hot sauce. That includes serving it with wings, adding it to many recipes, using it in a marinade, or using it with ribs.
Things are a little different if the sauce is honey-based instead. Here are a few other ideas to experiment with:
- Drizzle it on ice cream (yes, really!)
- Use the sauce on pizza, especially if the pizza includes salami
- Serve it with chicken, as a few recipes on this list have
- Serve on a charcuterie board (you could even serve honeycomb on the same board)
- Add to chicken sandwiches
- Use it on fried chicken and waffles to make your breakfast even more exciting
- Include it in a healthy honey drink as a tonic for cold and flu symptoms
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Hot Honey Sauce Spicy?
The sauce can be spicy, but it doesn’t need to be. Some recipes and brands add just enough hot peppers to make the sauce interesting, but no more than that. If you’re making the sauce yourself, you can adjust the amount of hot pepper to match your spice preferences.
What Is The Best Honey To Use?
Mild honey works well, particularly clover honey. This way there aren’t any overwhelming flavors from the honey. Buckwheat honey works well too, as it has molasses tones in its flavor profile. These should naturally complement the chili.
How Long Does Hot Honey Last?
When stored well, honey lasts almost indefinitely. Hot peppers have a long shelf life too, so any honey-based sauce should have a shelf life of six months or more. Keep it in an airtight container and you’re good to go.
Products made using hot sauce may have a shorter shelf life, but you should still get a few months out of it. Keeping the sauce in the fridge should help it to survive.
19 Foods That Cause Itching
Leave a Reply