Looking to reduce your intake of brown sugar, without cutting sweets from your life? Honey is the way to go. It’s a natural sweetener with some flavor depth that stands in easily for brown sugar.
To get the best results with honey in lieu of brown sugar, you’ll want to make a few adjustments to account for flavor and textural differences between the two ingredients. Here’s what you need to know.
Read next: How to cook and bake with honey: Dos and don’ts
Use less honey
Honey is sweeter than brown sugar, so you can use less to get a similar result. If the recipe calls for 1 cup of brown sugar, use 3/4 cup honey instead. The same substitution ratio applies for a white sugar substitution.
This is the same quantity adjustment you’d make when substituting honey for white sugar. This makes sense, since brown sugar isn’t anything more than white sugar with added molasses.
Add molasses for flavor
The molasses in brown sugar delivers a deeper flavor than honey. You can adjust for this by adding 1 teaspoon of molasses to the recipe. Note that the difference between light brown sugar and dark brown sugar is the amount of molasses, so you may prefer up to 2 teaspoons of molasses for dark brown sugar substitutions.
Reduce liquids
For every 1 cup of honey you swap in, reduce other liquids in the recipe by 2 to 4 tablespoons. This adjustment offsets honey’s added moisture compared to brown sugar.
Add baking soda
You can improve the texture of baked goods by adding 1/4 teaspoon baking soda to the batter for every 1 cup of honey. Honey can weigh batters down so that the finished texture is too dense. The baking soda addresses that problem by reacting with the honey to create tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide gas. Those bubbles lift and lighten the batter so it’s less dense when cooked.
Lower oven temperature
Baked dishes that use honey will brown faster. To prevent burned tops, lower the oven temperature and watch your dish carefully as it nears the end of the cooking time. Reducing the baking temperature by 25°F or 15°C should do the trick.
Warm the honey and mix thoroughly
Honey is thicker and stickier than brown sugar, which can prevent thorough mixing. Warming the honey slightly makes a big difference. To warm honey without damaging its flavor, place a sealed honey jar or container into a bowl of warm water for a minute. That should loosen the honey so you can measure and mix it.
Use the right recipes
Honey can stand in for brown sugar in baked goods, sauces, marinades, and glazes, with adjustments as noted. Rubs can be a little tricky. Honey will change a dry rub to a wet rub and produce more of a glaze than a crispy bark. Oven-roasted and grilled meats tend to be better options for honey substitutions, versus low-and-slow smoking.
Some BlogChef brown sugar recipes you could use to refine your honey substitution skills are:
Swapping honey for brown sugar with confidence
Using honey instead of brown sugar can reduce your intake of refined foods and be a fun way to experiment in the kitchen. Once you understand how honey’s flavor and texture can work within your recipes, you can quickly identify which dishes will benefit from this substitution and which will falter.
