How to use honey instead of sugar in canning and baking recipes

text:how to use honey instead of sugar in canning and baking. photos of jam, doughnuts, blueberry sauce, and cookies.

If you’re avoiding refined sugar for health reasons, or if you want to bake and preserve using homegrown or local ingredients, honey is the best natural alternative. You can use honey instead of sugar in both canning and baking once you know a few simple conversion rules, and how to choose the right type for your needs.

Choosing the right type of honey to use instead of sugar for canning and baking

If you want to use honey instead of sugar in baking or canning, the flavour of the honey itself is something to keep in mind.

The milder-flavoured honeys are the best to use in canning and baking. Clover, blackberry, meadow, prickly box, and other honeys that are considered to be light or mild in flavour work best.

When canning fruit it is especially important to choose a mild-flavoured honey, because you don’t want to drown the flavour of the fruit.

In baking, the flavour of honey does not matter as much as for canning. Sometimes you may want to highlight the flavour of a particular honey in a cake, but if you are simply trying to replace the sweetness of sugar with honey and don’t want it to taste like honey, choose a mild-flavoured honey.

Sugar to honey metric conversions

Converting a metric canning or baking recipe to use honey instead of sugar is really simple: simply replace the sugar with honey 1:1 by weight.

Many baking and canning recipes have too much sugar for my taste, and fruit contains its own sugar as well, so you can often get away with reducing it even further.

Most old-fashioned jam recipes contain equal amounts of sugar and fruit by weight, but in my jam recipe (which I recommend eating within 2 years, but I have eaten 4 year old jam before), I use 600g honey to 1kg fruit.

600g honey to 1kg fruit makes a jam that keeps well unopened, and once opened, it can be kept at room temperature for a few days, or it will keep for a couple of months at fridge temperatures.

Canning fruit without any added sugar (or with reduced sugar)

If you want to reduce the amount of honey even further than the 1kg to 600g conversion above, it’s best to treat the jam as if it were a sauce or fruit purée and process it in a boiling water bath for around 20 minutes for pints or half pints, or 25 minutes for quarts. It will also need to be eaten within a day or two of opening the jar.

In wartime preserving manuals, it’s mentioned that you can safely water bath can fruit without any sugar at all, but that it should be used up within a year. Sugar is used in canned fruit in syrup recipes for flavour, colour, and texture, not for safety reasons. You can definitely follow any fruit in syrup recipe and reduce the amount of honey even further, but like the jam/sauce conversion above, it will need to be eaten quickly once it’s opened, and even unopened it won’t keep for as long on the shelf.

Sugar to honey metric conversion	Additional changes to recipe, storage, and shelf life
Replacing 1 kilogram sugar with 600 grams to 1 kilogram honey	None
Replacing 1 kilogram sugar with less than 600 grams of honey (or using no honey at all)	Boiling water bath can 20-25 minutes. Eat within 1 year. Once opened, eat within a day or two.

sugar-free canned blueberry sauce — *Blueberry sauce,* *made with no added sugar or honey.*

Volume conversions for replacing sugar with honey

Converting canning recipes that measure in cups is slightly more complicated than metric, but easy once you learn the following rule: honey weighs nearly twice as much as sugar, so there is more sweetness and preserving power in a cup of honey than there is in sugar, and you’ll need to use less.

1 cup of sugar weighs approximately 180 grams, whereas 1 cup of honey weighs 340 grams.

To replace one cup of sugar with honey in canning or baking recipes, use slightly over half a cup of honey.

Sugar in recipe	Replace with this amount of honey
½ cup	¼ cup
1 cup	½ cup
1 ½ cups	¾ cup
2 cups	1 cup

Baking with honey instead of sugar

To bake with honey instead of sugar in recipes, simply keep to the metric or volume rules for canning (using the same amount, if measuring by weight, or slightly over half a cup of honey for every one cup of sugar).

Real, natural honey will vary in its consistency from year to year. Shortly after pouring, it can be liquid and easy to measure for baking, but after a while, depending on what the bees have been foraging, it can crystallise and become unpourable.

If your honey has crystallised, you will need to melt it before using it in recipes. If you have a jar of honey, you can place it in a pot of warm water (up to 40ºC/104ºF) and this will slowly soften the whole jar. If you have a bucket of honey (or if you’re in a hurry), simply scoop honey with a spoon or fork onto your weighing scale until you have the right amount for the recipe, put it in a small pot, and then melt it over low heat on the stovetop until it’s liquid.

Cakes and other baked goods that use honey instead of sugar can colour up more quickly in the oven. It can help to reduce the oven temperature by 10ºC (18ºF), so that you bake a typical cake at 170ºC (338ºF) instead of 180ºC (356ºF).

Which baking recipes work best with honey?

Honey has a higher moisture content than sugar, so you may find that for some cookie recipes, the texture can turn out different to the same recipe made with sugar. Cakes and muffins are usually the simplest to convert, but you can still make cookies, bars, and slices with honey – if you’re not sure whether it will work or not, test out a small batch first.

apricot jam cookies made with honey instead of sugar on a plate — *Cookies made with honey instead of sugar*, from *A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen*

How to bake with maple syrup instead of sugar or honey

Pure maple syrup can be used in recipes in the same way has honey (replace the same weight of sugar with maple syrup, or use slightly over half a cup maple syrup to replace one cup of sugar).

The honey-sweet cookies from A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen work beautifully with any kind of maple syrup instead of honey. For any baking recipes where you don’t want to highlight the beautiful maple flavour, you may want to use a light variety of pure maple syrup.

How to use maple syrup instead of sugar in canning

For best results, choose a very mild-flavoured, light-coloured maple syrup. Replace sugar with maple syrup as you would for honey in the conversion tables above, replacing 1kg sugar with 600g maple syrup, or one cup sugar with slightly over half a cup of maple syrup.

How to use coconut sugar instead of white sugar

Coconut sugar is not really suitable for canning, because it has such a strong taste that can overpower the flavour of the fruit. I have used it to preserve quince though, and it works well for that. You can use coconut sugar in some baking recipes where its caramel flavour is welcome – it is particularly good in chocolate recipes. To replace white sugar with coconut sugar, just use the same amount of it (either in volume or metric) that you would for white sugar in a baking recipe.