Cafés, restaurants, and other food establishments often use honey as an alternative sweetener in their recipes. Since honey is a naturally and delectably sweet syrup, it’s the perfect ingredient for food and beverage businesses to utilize. In this blog, we’ll share five tips for baking with honey instead of sugar to help your business make the most out of this mouthwateringly sweet syrup. Review our tips to create the ultimate menu for your business and to bake the most delectable dishes.
Tip #1: Use Less Honey
When creating delicious pastries and sweets for a bakery, restaurant, or café, many bakers use too much honey in their recipes. It’s important to note that honey is naturally sweeter and more concentrated than table sugar. This means you need less honey to recreate the sweetness of sugar in a recipe. So before you begin adding this syrup to your recipes, remember to monitor the sweetness of your dish.
Tip #2: Consider Acidity
Unlike conventional sugar, honey contains an acidity that could affect your recipe. Luckily, balancing the acidity of honey is easy: simply add half a teaspoon of baking soda for every cup of honey you use in a recipe. This will neutralize the acid so that the food rises naturally and bakes completely.
Tip #3: Use the Right Honey Variety
Not all honey tastes the same, which is why it’s important to note the variety of honey you’ll use in your recipe. Depending on where your honey was collected and the type of pollen the hive collected, your honey variety could emit a distinctly different or unique taste. For example, some honey varieties—such as clover honey—are sweeter, while others are much more bitter. Ensure that when you purchase your wholesale baking ingredients, you find the right type of honey for your recipe.
Tip #4: Balance Moisture
Since honey is a syrup, baking with it means balancing the overall moisture of your recipe. Bakers who bake with honey commonly decrease the measurements of other liquid ingredients, such as milk and water, to offset the moisturization of their cakes, cookies, and brownies. Without these considerations, the texture and moisture of your baked goods are likely to be sloppy, watery, and inedible.
Tip #5: Decrease the Baking Time
Our number one tip for baking with honey instead of sugar is to decrease the baking time for your recipes. Since honey cooks considerably more quickly than sugar, overcooking it could cause it to burn and create a hard, crunchy texture.
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