Veracruz Hot Honey from Mexico

“Hot Honey” has certainly joined the zeitgeist thanks to lots of fried chicken chains and their bombastic marketing. (But all those ads are correct: hot honey goes really well with chicken.)

You might ask yourself: how do they get those bees to only go to flowers of spicy foods? While I love your creative mind, that’s not exactly how it happens. In order to create a “hot honey” you need to infuse it with other ingredients. But steeping or simply keeping those ingredients in the honey for an extended amount of time, the honey takes on the flavors and feels of the ingredients it’s mingling with. That’s how they get all that flavor into that honey.

This Veracruz Hot Honey features local ingredients of the Veracruz region of Mexico, including the honey itself. The single-origin honey is produced on a coffee estate, so the actual honey has a soft tone of coffee in the finish. In this case the bees only take nectar from the coffee plants and the honey they produce reflects the flowers they visited. That single-origin honey is steeped with a trio of native chipotle chiles: Meco, Mora, and Morita; then mixed with a bit of apple cider vinegar and a touch of roasted coffee. The honey is filtered before being jarred so you don’t see or feel any of the other ingredients, but their addition to the blend is well-received.

Over the years I’ve tasted plenty of hot honeys. Most of them were forgettable. Some were pretty good, but none of them reached the levels of the Veracruz Hot Honey. It’s purposeful. It may be “trendy” but it’s also really versatile and flavorful. We trudged through the morass of hot honey pretenders and wanna-bes to finally rest on this smoky, fruity, redolent beauty. I think you’ll really enjoy playing around with it and discovering new flavors along the way.

Start with meats like fried chicken, grilled pork or beef. Put a small dish of the hot honey on a charcuterie board and watch folks play around with the combinations. This is one of those finishing touches that gives all your cuisine a flavoful booster shot so start your hot honey odyssey today. You’ll be well rewarded.