The 21 Absolute Best Ways To Use Hot Honey

Stroll down the condiments aisle of any supermarket, and a virtual cornucopia of sauces, marinades, and dressings will dizzy you. The human propensity for condiments is nothing new, but we're constantly unearthing new uses for our favorite sauces and relishes — and every few years, a new phenomenon seems to emerge. In the 2010s, it was a humble, home-grown business called Mike's Hot Honey that earned cult favorite status.

Combining sweet, floral honey with hot peppers might have been unconventional, but hot honey's fan base has snowballed in the last few years. It's earned considerable recognition from pizza acolytes, who praise the complex way hot honey's sweet and spicy elements jive with everyone's favorite Friday night dinner, but there are myriad applications beyond 'za. Whether you buy it at the store or make hot honey at home, here are some of the absolute best ways to use hot honey.

Is there anything cozier than a hot toddy on a cold winter day? Made with a simple mix of honey, lemon juice, and whiskey and garnished with inviting baking spices like star anise and cinnamon, this piping-hot cocktail is great for warming your bones or soothing a sore throat. A classic hot toddy recipe uses plain honey, but you can kick things up a notch by swapping in hot honey.

Hot honey still provides the sweetness of the simple cocktail, but the hot chile peppers in the nectar give the drink a real zest, modernizing the timeless drink in a tasty and surprising way. Use the same amount of hot honey as you would plain honey to make this cocktail, and thank us later.

It's tough to think of a food or dish that is not enhanced by the presence of bacon — but is it possible to improve on bacon itself? We think the answer is yes, by way of caramelizing bacon with hot honey. Bacon carries flavors of salt, fat, and smoke, all of which are delicious qualities. When combined with the zippy heat of hot honey, however, bacon transforms into something even better.

It's not just bacon's taste that hot honey upgrades. When the spicy nectar is spread on bacon before cooking in the oven, the honey crystallizes and creates a candy-like coating outside the bacon, leading to a delightfully crispy, crunchy, and slightly sticky texture. Use hot honey bacon to ramp up BLTs, bacon-wrapped dates, salads, and more.

When it comes to quick, easy, filling lunches, quesadillas are 10/10. A tortilla and fillings of choice are all needed for a quick 'dilla, and assembly is as easy as throwing your fillings in the tortilla, folding it in half, and tossing it into a hot pan on the stove. Like many Mexican dishes, quesadillas are often stuffed with spicy ingredients. Why stop there?

The next time you have a hankering for a cheesy fried tortilla, give your quesadillas a kick with hot honey. Honey's nectarous flavor melds well with meat, veggies, and cheese, and the spice from piquant honey won't overpower any other spicy filling you're working with. Drizzle the zippy honey on top, serve it as a dipping sauce on the side, or put it right inside the tortilla with your filling.

Honey and eggs might sound like an odd couple, but the peculiar food combination actually works. In fact, honey and eggs have been combined throughout history: The oldest known omelet recipe was published in the Roman Apicius and contained honey, and rumor has it honey and eggs were Albert Einstein's favorite breakfast.

We can't promise eating honey and eggs will boost your brainpower to Einstein levels, but we can confirm it's delicious. Sub in hot honey, and we're cookin' with gas (perhaps literally). Fry your eggs in a hot honey and butter combo and baste the liquid over your eggs while they cook, or drizzle your over-easies with spicy honey once they've already been cooked, perhaps over toast. Give it a shot — at the very least, you'll be in historic company.

Hot honey's high viscosity makes it ideal for drizzling over your favorite foods, but it's just as delicious when incorporated into a dipping sauce. Honey is an excellent natural sweetener and can honestly act as a stand-in for most cooking recipes that require sugar, maple syrup, or other types of sweetener (baking recipes are a different story).

Substitute hot honey for regular honey in a honey mustard sauce for a sweet and piquant dip for chicken tenders. Add a few teaspoons of spicy honey to a homemade aioli to flesh out the sauce with both fiery heat and saccharinity. Alternatively, use hot honey by itself as a dip, the way we do in this roasted corn and squash quesadillas with hot honey dipping sauce recipe.

A burger might be the last place on earth where you'd think to add a sweet ingredient. But in recent years, upscale burger joints (you know, the ones where a small burger costs $16 for some reason) have experimented with adding items like peach preserves, apricot jam, fig spread, and other sweet things to their burgers. And you know what? It's actually pretty freaking fantastic.

Assuming you're not a burger purist, use hot honey to add a blast of sweet heat to your burger. It's intriguing enough on a classic meat, cheese, lettuce, onion, and tomato burger, but add it to a bacon and BBQ, goat cheese and pesto, or jalapeño and pepper jack concoction and see what best suits your taste buds. We recommend drizzling spicy honey on the top bun for the optimal ratio of hot honey per bite.

If the word "salad" makes your eyes glaze over, you're probably doing them wrong. It's all about selecting the right mix of greens, fruits, veggies, nuts, cheeses, and dressings, which are incredibly easy to make at home. Tons of homemade salad dressings use honey as a natural sweetener, and hot honey can be integrated into almost any dressing recipe that calls for honey.

There's no limit to the ways in which you can incorporate hot honey into your dressings — use it to add spice to honey mustard, lend a peppery sweetness to a vinaigrette, or even enhance a cream-based dressing. Not sure where to start? Take a gander at this hot honey and sweet potato salad recipe to better understand how hot honey can revamp a simple salad dressing.

There's something about the hot honey's zest that coaxes crispy, salty, fatty foods to sing like a choir of angels, and fried chicken is a quintessential example of this pairing done right. Fried chicken is one of those dishes that requires some kind of sauce — even if the chicken is perfectly cooked and juicy, the crunchy outer coating just can't do the heavy lifting on its own.

For a nice, light sauce option, take a ride on the hot honey coaster. It's perfect for drizzling over fried chicken, adding a sugary zip without overpowering the flavor of the chicken or the batter. Hot honey is fantastic when spread over big fried chicken breasts or thighs with a side of mashed potatoes and collards, or try these fried chicken sliders with hot honey and a simple slaw.

Boozy slushies are a great way to cool down on a hot summer day. You can certainly roll up to that cute new wine bar and shell out $14 for a teensy cup of frosé — or you can skip the long lines and save your money by making a boozy slushie at home. Might we suggest our hot honey-bourbon slushie recipe to kick things off?

This frozen cocktail puts hot honey to work by adding both extra sweetness and a fiery bite to rich vanilla ice cream and the caramel, marzipan, and oak notes commonly found in bourbon for a refreshingly decadent dessert. Not a bourbon fan? No worries — try using hot honey to integrate some sweet heat into your frozen cocktail or slushie of choice.

The history of cooking and the evolution of recipes is a fascinating topic. One of the oldest known "cookbooks" in existence is the Roman Apicius, which includes such delicacies as pear patina, sweet spelt cakes, and the intriguing Alexandrian sweets. Alexandrian sweets are mentioned in early texts, but the only two confirmed ingredients are honey and sesame seeds, meaning the finished sweets likely had a sticky, crunchy, granola-like texture.

Honestly? As simple as this evasive and perhaps incomplete recipe might be, it sounds pretty dang delicious. You can try your hand at making these Roman Empire desserts at home by combining saccharine honey and nutty sesame seeds, rolling them into balls, or pressing them into bars. For an even more complex flavor profile, use hot honey in place of the plain stuff.