It’s getting easier and easier to eat at home, thanks to small-batch preserves, homemade hot sauces and the seasonal dressing we can buy straight off of Instagram.
The hottest desi table condiment, however, has American roots and could topple the Sriracha supremacy in your pantry. We’re talking about the hot honey — the spiced honey variant is usually made by infusing honey with fresh or dried chilli peppers. It makes for the perfect topping for fried meat or pizzas because the heat cuts right through the fat.
Hot honey first found visibility in New York during the early 2000s. Mike Kurtz of Mike’s Hot Honey was the first entrepreneur to put hot honey products in the American market. Kurtz, a Brooklyn resident, stumbled upon the pairing in a tiny Brazilian pizzeria, which had chilli-infused honey on each table. In 2010, Kurtz began working as an apprentice for Brooklyn pizza joint Paulie Gee, where he introduced the honey as a topping. It wasn’t long before it found some word-of-mouth hype.
The trend resurfaced this year, with the rise of no-cooking cooking and the boom in artisanal table condiments that also double up as cooking agents. Hot honey is the perfect dressing for lazy three-ingredient salads or leftover fried chicken.
Nomad Food Project’s Advaith Inamke introduced hot honey to the brand’s line-up, to cater to his vegetarian customers (the Pune brand is famed for its bacon-based relishes). “We went for a honey tasting with our friends to Moonshine Meadery in Pune, who use honey to make their meads. And I realised we have so many homegrown brands making honey and yet we don’t have options for spiced honey in the Indian market. We introduced our Hot Honey a few months ago and it’s already quite popular. Masaba Gupta, for instance, loved it and paired it with fried chicken,” Inamke shares.
Hot honey can seamlessly replace your acidic vinaigrette as a salad dressing and maybe even Sriracha, because the hot-sweet pairing unlocks the heady notes of the pepper (especially if you’re using a multi-floral honey). “We use Thai Bird’s Eye chilli for our hot honey recipe, so it’s distinctly different from the American hot honey, it starts sweet and ends on a heady note,” Inamke breaks down.
Twitter, meanwhile is justifiably obsessed with the trend...