Dandelion Honey Recipe (from Flowers)

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Dandelion honey is a golden, honey-flavored syrup made from the yellow petals of spring dandelions. The petals really do taste like honey, so this easy dandelion honey recipe turns a basket of flowers from the yard into a vegan honey for tea, biscuits, and baking.

Dandelions carpet our 30 acres here in Vermont, bursting into bright yellow each spring. I like to joke that we’re dandelion farmers. We could harvest these beauties by the tractor-trailer load, and the bees would never notice.

So every spring, I make a few new dandelion recipes. Some are old-fashioned, like dandelion wine, and some are newer treats for the kids, like dandelion cookies and dandelion marshmallows.

When we want something sweet and honey-flavored, I make dandelion flower recipes. For savory dishes like sauteed greens, salads, pesto, and pasta, I go to dandelion greens recipes. And for medicine, I put in the extra work and dig roots for dandelion root recipes.

My littles are fond of those sweet dandelion petals. They’ll gladly skip around the yard with their foraging baskets if they know the flowers are headed for a new dandelion dessert. A lot of those desserts start with dandelion honey.

Dandelions taste like honey, you see. Or perhaps it’s better to say that honey tastes like dandelions, depending on how you look at it. Bees make honey from dandelion nectar, after all.

These days, dandelion honey is mostly used as a vegan honey substitute, and you’ll also see it called dandelion syrup. It’s an old recipe, though, made for generations by families with plenty of flowers and not much honey.

History of Dandelion Honey

Dandelion honey is an old folk recipe, made in country kitchens in many parts of Europe, where real honey was too precious for everyday use. It goes by a lot of names. In German it’s Löwenzahnhonig, and in Bosnia it’s med od maslačka, or honey from dandelions.

In the Franche-Comté region of eastern France, a set version called cramaillotte is made from dandelion flowers, citrus, sugar, and often pectin. It’s closer to a soft jelly than a syrup, with a blond color a lot like honey.

Dandelions made the trip to America, too. European settlers brought them over, some of them on purpose, since they were valued as food and medicine.

Dandelion honey is made with sugar, so it won’t make a true mead (honey wine). It works just fine everywhere else you’d use honey, though. So why not save the real honey for mead, and make dandelion honey for everything else?

Ingredients for Dandelion Honey

Dandelion honey takes four ingredients, and three of them are already in your kitchen. Lime juice works in place of the lemon juice, and so does citric acid.

The amounts depend on how many petals you have the patience to clean. The recipe scales by the cup of petals, and the ratio is in the Yield Notes below.

• Dandelion petals: Use only the yellow parts. The green bracts around the outside of the flower head are even more bitter than the leaves, and they’ll make the whole batch bitter. Pick from a clean, unsprayed area, and if you’re new to foraging, start with identifying dandelions and their look-alikes.
• Sugar: Plain white sugar keeps the color golden and lets the dandelion flavor come through. It’s also what thickens the syrup and helps preserve it, so this isn’t a recipe for cutting the sugar.
• Water: The petals steep in it to make a dandelion tea, and most of it boils off later. The exact amount left after straining doesn’t matter much.
• Lemon juice: Honey is naturally a little acidic, so a splash of lemon juice gives the syrup the same gentle tang. It also helps it keep. Lime juice adds the same acidity with a different flavor, and citric acid works too.

Most dandelion honey recipes call for whole sliced lemons, simmered peel and all with the petals for about 30 minutes. Lemon peels are high in pectin, which helps thicken the syrup, but they’re also bitter, especially once they’re cooked. You can taste that same bitterness in lemon marmalade, and the long simmer drives off some of the dandelion flavor too.

I use plain lemon juice instead. Most of a lemon’s pectin is in the peel and pith, but this syrup thickens from the sugar, not from pectin. The juice brings the tang without the bitterness.

How to Make Dandelion Honey

Making dandelion honey is pretty simple, really. You pick the flowers, pull the yellow petals out of the green parts, steep them like tea, and boil the tea with sugar until it’s as thick as honey.

The slow part is cleaning the petals. The cooking goes quickly, and a thermometer takes the guesswork out of knowing when it’s done.

Pick the Dandelions

Pick dandelion blossoms on a sunny day, in mid to late morning, when they’re fully open. Choose a clean, unsprayed area, away from roadsides.

The whole flowers take up about four times as much space as the cleaned petals, so pick more than you think you need. You can rinse them if you like. I harvest mine right after they open and check them as I’m picking, so they’re pretty darn clean.

Separate the Petals

Break each flower in half from top to bottom, so you have a left side and a right side. That opens up the center, and you can pull the yellow petals out with your fingers without getting any of the green around the outside.

Take your time here. A few petals left behind on the flower won’t matter, but bits of green will make the dandelion honey bitter. Any extra petals can go into a jar of dandelion liqueur or dandelion infused gin.

Steep the Petals

Bring the water to a boil in a small saucepan, or a bigger pot for a big batch, then take it off the heat. Stir in the petals and let them steep for about 30 minutes, or longer if you like.

Recipes all over the internet disagree on this step. Some steep the petals overnight and some for 15 minutes, and some simmer them while others just pour boiling water over the top. We’ve been making dandelion tea for years here, and it honestly doesn’t matter all that much. Simmering drives off some of the more delicate floral flavor, but even half an hour at a simmer still makes a lovely dandelion honey.

Strain the Tea

Pour the tea through a fine mesh strainer, press gently on the petals, and save the liquid. The spent petals can go in the compost.

You’ll have a little less tea than the water you started with, since some boils off and the petals soak some up. It doesn’t matter, because most of the water cooks off in the next step anyway.

Add the Sugar and Lemon Juice

Pour the tea back into the saucepan and add the sugar and lemon juice.

Stir over medium heat until every bit of sugar dissolves, before it comes to a boil. Undissolved sugar and crystals stuck to the side of the pan are what turn dandelion honey grainy later, so brush the sides down with a wet pastry brush.

Boil to Thread Stage

Turn the heat to high and boil it hard, without stirring, until it reaches 230 to 235 degrees F (110 to 113 degrees C). That’s thread stage in candy making, about 80 percent sugar, and real honey is roughly 80 percent sugar too. The syrup is thick enough to spin a thread off a spoon, but not thick enough to form a soft ball once it cools.

An instant-read thermometer makes this much easier, since it’s hard to judge the thickness while it’s hot. The dandelion honey thickens a lot as it cools. On an average stove, one batch takes about 15 minutes to get there, and a bigger batch takes much longer.

At higher elevations, take 2 degrees F off for every 1,000 feet above sea level, so thread stage is about 220 to 225 degrees F at 5,000 feet. Another way is to check your thermometer in boiling water first. Thread stage is about 18 to 23 degrees above whatever it reads, which accounts for your altitude and your thermometer at the same time.

Watch it closely for the last few minutes. The temperature climbs slowly at first and then quickly near the end, which is when it’s most likely to scorch. Turning the heat down to medium for those last few minutes helps.

Jar the Dandelion Honey

Take the pan off the heat as soon as it reaches thread stage. Pour the hot dandelion honey into warm, clean jars, and leave the last bit in the pan rather than scraping it out.

Let the jars cool on the counter, then put on the lids and store them in the fridge.

Jelly-Style Dandelion Honey with Apples

The other way to make dandelion honey is more like a loose-set jelly. Green apples simmer with the petals and add their pectin, so it thickens with less sugar than the syrup. (I still make dandelion jelly too, but that one uses boxed pectin for a firmer set and brighter flavor.)

Tart, hard, pectin-rich storage apples used to keep all winter and still be hard come spring. We have one such tree, a Newton Pippin, and they don’t soften or sweeten until they’ve been stored for 9 to 12 months, believe it or not. Crazy the variety of apples that used to grow in the old days, for every purpose under the sun, even thickening early spring preserves.

For the apple version, you’ll need these, plus sugar once it’s strained:

• 3 cups chopped green apples (about 1 pound of whole apples)
• 2 cups dandelion petals, yellow parts only
• 4 cups water
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice (or a few stalks of chopped rhubarb, for acidity)

Choose firm, tart green apples, like Granny Smith. Don’t peel or core them, just chop them whole, since the peels and cores hold the most pectin.

Bring everything but the sugar to a boil, then turn it down to a gentle simmer for about 30 minutes. Keep it at a simmer, not a hard rolling boil. Strain out the solids and measure the liquid. You’ll probably have about 2 to 2 1/2 cups.

Add 1 cup of sugar for every cup of liquid, bring it back to a boil, and cook it until it starts to gel. That’s about 218 degrees F for a softer set, or 220 degrees F for a slightly firmer one, and the same 2 degrees per 1,000 feet comes off at altitude. You can also test it on a plate chilled in the freezer.

This makes about 3 cups of soft-set jelly. It’s a little less sweet than the syrup. Keep it in the fridge or freezer too.

Ways to Use Dandelion Honey

Use homemade dandelion honey anywhere you’d use honey. The sugar concentration is about the same, and so is the acidity, so it works much like honey in baking and tastes quite similar.

Stir it into a cup of tea, or a mug of dandelion tea. Dandelion honey is unbelievable on biscuits and muffins, much like real honey, but a bit lighter. It’s good drizzled over a scoop of dandelion and honey ice cream too.

It works in honey-centric baking, too, like Danish honninghjerter (honey heart cookies), and my dandelion cream pie takes either honey or dandelion honey.

The apple version is a little different. It’s less sweet than real honey and has pectin, which changes how it cooks. It’s still great on muffins and biscuits, but it may not bake the same way in recipes.

Storage and Shelf Life

Keep dandelion honey in the fridge. It’s high in sugar, which is a natural preservative, but it doesn’t have all the natural antimicrobial compounds real honey has. Real honey is shelf stable indefinitely, and dandelion honey isn’t.

There’s no tested process for canning flower syrups, so dandelion honey is a refrigerator recipe. Most people aren’t making it in huge batches for preservation anyway, and the flavor stays nicer in the fridge.

In a closed jar in the fridge, plan to use it within about a month. For longer storage, freeze it in straight-sided, freezer-safe jars with 1 inch of headspace. It’s so high in sugar that it won’t freeze solid, so you can spoon out what you need.

If it turns white and grainy, the sugar has crystallized. It’s still fine to use. Warm it gently in a saucepan with a splash of water, stirring until it’s clear again.

Dandelion Honey Recipe FAQs

Readers ask about refrigerating it, canning it, sugary crystals, lime juice, and rinsing the petals, so those are all here.

More Dandelion Recipes

More sweet treats from a basket of dandelions.

Dandelion & Honey Marshmallows (No Corn Syrup!)

Dandelion & Honey Gummy Bears

Dandelion Shortbread Cookies

More Edible Flower Recipes

More ways to cook with spring and summer flowers.

Elderflower Cordial

Lilac Donuts ~ Edible Flower Donuts with Lilacs

Lilac Popsicles