Hot honey Honey — What It Is, How It's Made, and Who Makes It Best

In November 2003, a UMass-Amherst student named Mike Kurtz was four or five days into a hiking trip in a Brazilian national park when he and his friends descended into a small valley town. There was one dirt road in and out, and at the end of it, a small pizzeria. The tables had jars of honey on them — honey infused with chili peppers, set out for drizzling on pies. Mike tried it. He came home thinking about it.

Back at UMass-Amherst, he started experimenting in his dorm room, working through different honey varietals and different chili peppers and different infusion techniques until he settled on a recipe. He gave jars to friends and family for years as Christmas gifts. He worked in the music industry in New York for a while. Then in 2010 he took an apprenticeship at a Neapolitan-style pizzeria in Greenpoint called Paulie Gee's, and one day he brought a bottle in for the owner to try on a soppressata pie. That pizza became The Hellboy, and The Hellboy became a permanent menu item, and customers started asking if they could buy bottles to take home, and Mike started selling 12-ounce bottles off the bar. Within fifteen years, Mike's Hot Honey was on 30,000 grocery store shelves and pulling in $40 million a year.

That's the modern American origin story. The longer one starts somewhere in southern Italy, probably in Calabria, where peperoncino — the local hot chili pepper — has been a kitchen staple for nearly five centuries. Calabrians put chili in everything, including, eventually, honey. Tutto Calabria, founded in 1970, makes miele al peperoncino — orange blossom honey infused with Calabrian chili. The chili-and-honey combination itself has been part of Italian regional cooking far longer than any commercial brand. The Brazilian pizzeria Mike walked into in 2003 was almost certainly continuing a tradition that traveled from Italy to Brazil with immigrants generations before, and from Brazil to a Brooklyn pizzeria a few decades later, where it became the thing in your pantry now.

The reason the combination works isn't complicated, even if the chemistry has nice details. Capsaicin — the compound in chilies that produces heat — binds to receptors in your mouth that also respond to actual hot temperatures. Sugar, especially in liquid form, soothes those receptors. Honey is mostly sugar, plus floral compounds, plus a little acidity. So when you drizzle hot honey on pizza, the sweetness hits first, then the savory of the food, then the heat builds about a second behind everything else. Mike calls this the duality of flavor. It's why a small drizzle of hot honey can transform a dish without overwhelming it: the sweet and the heat are doing different work on different schedules, and your brain reads it as complexity rather than chaos.

Hot honey is now its own commercial category. There are dozens of brands, ranging from honey-forward and barely-warm to extracts of the world's hottest peppers. Some are made with single-floral honeys; most are wildflower or generic blends. Heat sources include habanero, jalapeño, Calabrian chili, ghost pepper, Carolina Reaper, and various smoked variants. The good ones taste like honey first and chili second. The merely hot ones taste like punishment.

The process

How it's usually made

Most hot honey starts with one of two things: a wildflower honey or a clover honey, both selected because they're affordable, mild, and don't have strong floral notes that would compete with the chili. A few producers go more particular — Tutto Calabria uses orange blossom; Mike's Hot Honey, as of 2017, sourced wildflower from a single supplier with about 4,000 hives in Jefferson County in upstate New York. The base honey question matters more than most casual buyers realize: a thin, mass-produced honey will give you a thin hot honey no matter how good the chili is. A characterful base honey gives the heat something to ride on.

The chili work is where producers diverge. Some — Bushwick Kitchen, Savannah Bee, Nate's — use oleoresin habanero, an extracted concentrate of habanero pepper. Oleoresin gives consistent heat with no visible pepper material in the finished honey, which makes for a clean amber bottle on the shelf. Others use whole or sliced peppers and let them steep. Tutto Calabria steeps Calabrian peppers in their honey for extended periods. Mike's Hot Honey uses chili peppers imported from Brazil, chosen specifically because the heat profile lands on the back of the palate after the sweetness; the actual recipe and pepper variety remain proprietary.

The infusion itself is a low-and-slow operation. Honey is heated gently — usually well under 180°F to preserve enzymatic activity and floral character — and the chilies steep until the producer hits their heat target. Some recipes add vinegar (apple cider is common; Mike's includes vinegar in their published ingredients) which extends shelf life and adds a subtle brightness that keeps the finished product from feeling cloying. The peppers are usually strained out before bottling, though a few craft producers leave them in for visual effect and continued infusion.

Heat tuning is mostly empirical. There's no industry-standard Scoville rating for finished hot honey — pepper variety, infusion time, sugar content, and personal palate all interact in ways that defy clean measurement. Producers taste, adjust, taste again. Most settle on a heat level they consider "honey-first with a kick." A few — Elijah's Xtreme and Fuego Spice are two — use Carolina Reaper peppers (the world's hottest, technically) but moderate the heat with sugar load and end up at what they themselves call medium intensity. The lesson there is that pepper choice is only one variable. How much, how long, what base, what dilution — those decide the final heat as much as the pepper does.

Heat guide

Where the heat lives

Not all hot honey burns the same. Positions are approximate and reflect typical heat levels — your mileage may vary.

Worth knowing

Producers in the hot honey category

These are the names that come up when people who know this category talk about it. Selected for craft, transparency, and contribution to the category.

Mike's Hot Honey

Brooklyn, NY

The one that built the category. Mike Kurtz started with a Brazilian pizzeria memory and a UMass dorm room and ended up redefining what most Americans think a pizza tastes like. Their Original is honey-first with a long, gentle heat that builds after the sweetness, designed for drizzling. The Extra Hot is the same recipe with more chili. As of 2017 the base was wildflower honey from a single Jefferson County, NY supplier — current sourcing may have evolved with the company's scale. If you've never had hot honey before, this is the place to start.

Tutto Calabria — MielHOT

Marcellinara, Italy

The Italian heritage version. Orange blossom honey (called zagara honey in Italy, from citrus blooms) steeped with Calabrian chili peppers from the same operation that has been packing peperoncino for decades. The orange blossom base gives this a distinctly different character — more floral, less wildflower-warm than the American versions. If you want to taste the tradition Mike's was riffing on, this is it.

Savannah Bee Company — Hot Honey

Savannah, GA

Wildflower honey infused with habanero oleoresin. Won the 2022 Flavor of Georgia award. Sits squarely in the balanced range — more heat than Mike's Original, less than the ghost pepper category. Savannah Bee built its reputation on tupelo honey from the Georgia-Florida tupelo trees; the hot honey is a side line, but a serious one. Worth trying alongside their honey hot sauce (a separate product made with Scotch Bonnet peppers, which won a 2020 SOFI Award) for two different angles on sweet-and-spicy from the same producer.

How to use it

Best uses for hot honey honey

Pizza

The original use case. The combination works best on pies with savory and salty toppings that the heat can balance against — soppressata, pepperoni, hot Italian sausage, prosciutto. The Hellboy at Paulie Gee's is soppressata + mozzarella + Parmigiano Reggiano + a drizzle of Mike's.

Fried chicken

Nashville-style hot chicken absorbs hot honey better than almost any other dish, and a drizzle on plain fried chicken approximates the same effect.

Cheese boards

Hot honey loves brie, goat cheese, blue cheese, sharp cheddar, gorgonzola. It does not love feta or queso fresco — those are salt-heavy enough that the hot honey throws the salt-spice-sweet balance off.

Vanilla ice cream

The cold-and-heat contrast is the entire point: the cream coats and soothes; the heat builds and recedes; the vanilla bridges the two. Cheesecake works for the same reason.

Roasted vegetables

Brussels sprouts especially gain a useful glaze when finished with hot honey while still warm enough to disperse it.

Cocktails

Works in cocktails that already have a sweet-acid balance to play with — whiskey sours, margaritas, palomas, Bloody Marys. Replace simple syrup with hot honey at roughly half the volume and adjust acid to taste.

The story

How hot honey honey got here

The interesting thing about hot honey isn't that it exists — chili-and-honey combinations exist in many cuisines and have for a long time. The interesting thing is how a niche tradition went from a specific Brazilian pizzeria to a Brooklyn apprentice's dorm room to a $40 million American grocery category in roughly two decades. It's a story about how food trends actually move.

The American food media largely missed hot honey for the first half of its commercial life. Mike Kurtz was selling bottles off the bar at Paulie Gee's in 2010, but the product didn't reach Whole Foods until 2014. CBS This Morning ran a feature in 2020 — ten years in. By that point, the food world had already absorbed hot honey through a different channel: working chefs and front-of-house staff at New York pizzerias who ate at each other's restaurants, told each other what was working, and brought ideas back to their own kitchens. Hot honey spread through the Brooklyn pizza scene the same way pepperoni once spread through Italian-American food: organically, hand to hand, one menu at a time.

Paul Giannone — Paulie himself — deserves more credit in this story than he usually gets. When Mike brought him a bottle, the easy move would have been polite interest and no menu changes. Putting it on a permanent menu item, calling it The Hellboy, and letting customers carry bottles out the door took an active decision by an established restaurateur to bet on a thing his apprentice was making in small batches. The category exists in part because Paulie said yes.

What's also worth noticing is what hot honey isn't. It's not a regional American invention — Italians and Brazilians got there first. It's not a single innovation — it's an interpretation, hotter and more chili-forward, of an existing tradition. It's not even Mike's specific recipe that defines the category — there are now Carolina Reaper variants, ghost pepper variants, smoked variants, Scotch Bonnet variants, all of which would have been unrecognizable as the same product to the original Brazilian pizzeria. What hot honey is, mostly, is permission. Permission to put sweet on savory and savory on sweet. Permission to add heat to a dessert. Permission to ignore the rule that cocktails need simple syrup. The category opened up a flavor combination that had always existed but rarely traveled outside of regional pockets, and made it into a kitchen staple. The bottle on your counter is the result.

It's also worth saying — because the platform is ours and we can — that hot honey at scale has the same problem most popular food categories develop. There's now a long tail of mediocre product. Honey of unclear provenance, "natural flavor" standing in for actual chili infusion, marketing copy that overpromises. Most of the products that hit the category in the last five years are not as good as the original five or six were. The producers profiled above are not the only good ones, but they are honestly good ones. The rest is up to your palate.

Marketplace

Browse Hot honey

Tap any card for details. Rankings are independent of affiliate commissions.

6.4

— Nature Nate's —

Hot Honey

United States

Hot honey