WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER COOK HONEY

Sometimes a touch of sweetness is just what the doctor ordered. While I mostly use jaggery in my recipes, maple syrup, coconut sugar and the king of sweeteners, raw honey also feature in desserts and sweet snacks. Honey is sacred in cultures around the world, renowned for its healing qualities both internally and externally (e.g. to cleanse wounds and as a beauty treatment) and according to Ayurveda also enhances the benefits of Ayurvedic medicines such as herbal spice blends and other foods. In Ayurveda, honey comes with a pretty significant caveat: it should never be “cooked” and if used in hot preparations should be allowed to cool before consuming. Extensive heating at high temperatures not only strips it of its nutrients, but cooked honey and honey served hot is potentially harmful for our bodies.

WHY IS HONEY SO BENEFICIAL?

This golden nectar, when you choose the pure, preferably organic type (check out my shop for one of my faves), is chock-full of nutrients and medicinal properties. It is antiseptic, antifungal and antibacterial — it even helps to stop bleeding from skin wounds and stomach ulcers.

Think that’s quite enough for a pretty basic ingredient you’ve probably not thought twice about before? But wait, there’s more! Honey stimulates the metabolism, and can help with anaemia, lung health, skin issues, as well as being great to soothe a sore throat. And if you can get your hands on local honey, even better — not only will it help support the local economy and the environment by helping to safeguard the bees that are so central to our ecosystem, but it can also help alleviate allergies if you’re prone to them. Finally, honey is perfect if you’re experiencing a Kapha imbalance.

Thanks to all of this, Vedic civilisation considers honey to be a gift from nature — not to mention it’s *blooming* delicious in all its many varieties.

WHY SHOULD YOU NEVER COOK IT?

Raw honey (i.e. in its least processed and unpasteurised form) is liquid gold for overall wellbeing, but its benefits are negated if you cook it or serve it hot. That’s why I don’t use it in my baking or roasting for example or to sweeten drinks or sauces served hot. If I want to add it to a herbal tea to soothe my throat then I wait for the drink to cool to a drinkable temperature. Why is this? Well, Ayurveda considers cooked honey to be a poison.

From the most basic point of view, honey can quickly turn bitter when cooked, so you wouldn’t want it in your puddings anyway. Additionally, Ayurveda advises that cooked honey can negatively affect your health in the long term because it gains a glue-like consistency, which produces toxins — or Ama — during digestion. This means it will make it much harder for you to digest any other foods as well. Digestion is central to overall health in Ayurveda, so this can then lead to a host of other issues, for instance weight gain, constipation, congestion, etc.

Notably, Western science seems to agree with the notion that cooked honey is noxious. One study found that heated honey produced a significant amount of hydroxymethyl furfuraldehyde (HMF), which in turn may cause negative effects on your health, though more research is needed at this stage.

What about heating honey briefly as opposed to cooking it? According to Ayurveda, honey has the qualities of being “hot,” therefore heating it exacerbates these hot qualities. For the same reason it is best to avoid consuming honey on a hot day or with hot and spicy or fermented foods.

As a basic rule of thumb I stick to raw honey produced by small producers (locally if possible! Try your local farmers’ market) as opposed to the less nutritious, mass produced, highly processed (pasteurised, ultra-filtered) kind blended from imports from around the world popular in supermarkets, and only consume it in warm, room temperature or cold preparations. I avoid “honey-baked” goods (such as cereals and cakes), “honey-roast” snacks and honey-sweetened hot drinks. It’s also worth checking the label when buying “honey” products — you might find that some of those so called “honey syrups” are full of corn syrup or fructose syrup — according to this article, honey is the world’s third most faked food. Artisanal raw honey bears quite a price difference to commercially produced honey but this is reflected in how I use it — sparingly. Respect the medicine!