8 Tips For Cooking With Honey

As Sandy pointed out earlier September is National Honey Month. I wanted to kick things off with a couple tips for cooking with honey.

Here are 8 tips to help make cooking with, and using honey a little easier.

1. Store your honey at room temperature, not in the refrigerator.
2. Keep honey in a tightly closed container or it will attract bugs, and lose its flavor.
3. When you use honey for baking you can substitute 3/4 cup of honey for 1 cup of sugar.
4. When you substitute honey of sugar when cooking reduce the amount of wet ingredients by 1/4 cup for every cup of honey used. 
5. When you use honey to cook with use your measuring cup to measure the other liquid ingredients first. Honey will come out of the measuring cup better if it is wet.
6. Bring crystallized honey back to its original consistency by placing the honey in its container in a pan of warm water until the crystals go away.
7. When you substitute honey in your baked goods lower the cooking temperature by about 25.`
8. Add 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda for each cup of honey you substitute when baking to help neutralize the honey’s acidity.

Honey is a natural, unprocessed sweetener. I try to substitute it whenever possible to use in my baked goods, and cooking (instead of sugar). Whenever possible I try to get my honey from a local beekeeper (usually my uncle or my sister), instead of from the supermarket. I’d rather encourage small independent beekeepers than to encourage large operations that don’t always have the bee’s best interests in mind.

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