Hot Honey

2 ingredients and some patience and that's all it takes to have some hot honey for recipes! You can use regular crushed red pepper slakes of any other dried pepper flakes you like. For the batch here, I used Thai chili flakes that I made myself a while back.

Dried Thai chilies are great way to make your hot honey hot!

I was in the grocery store and came across a package of fresh Thai chili peppers and bought the to try in a recipe or two. This was a tiny package and I used like 2 peppers and they are wicked hot. I sat them on the counter figuring I'd do more things with them when I noticed that they began to turn from green to red and then shrivel. That was my queue to let 'em go and crush them once they were completely dry. When all was said and done, I had about 3 tablespoons of pulverized Thai chili and it's been a year and I STILL have some. A little goes a long way!

Back to the hot honey.....

Put some honey in a glass mason jar or other container that you can seal. Stir in some dried pepper product, and close it up. Let it sit for at least a week before using. The longer it sits, the hotter it gets and it keeps a long time!

I used about a tablespoon of this ridiculously hot flaked Thai chili peppers. After the jar sat for a couple of days, I tasted it and decided to scoop out some of the flakes because it would have been way too hot to use after more time. When I did this with garden variety crushed red pepper flakes from the store, it was much more mild -- even after time.

If you're in a rush, you can heat the honey / pepper mixture either in the microwave or in a boiling water bath and that sort of steeps the pepper flakes to release some heat right away, and it will still get hotter by sitting.

Aside from using it to season focaccia, the hot honey will bring a new dimension to homemade honey mustard, salad dressings and marinades.