How to Make Honey Garlic: Our Family's Cold Season Jar
How to Make Honey Garlic: Our Family’s Cold Season Jar
Every fall, we make honey garlic. It’s one of those simple kitchen traditions I love having on hand during cold season: honey infused with fresh garlic that we can add to tea, drizzle over food, or take by the spoonful.
But there is an important food-safety piece here that I want to talk about.
You may have seen traditional recipes where fresh garlic is submerged in raw honey and left on the counter for weeks to “ferment.” I used to make it this way too. Updated food-safety guidance has made me change how I prepare it.
Fresh garlic contains quite a bit of moisture and is naturally low in acid. Once that moisture starts moving into the honey, the honey no longer has the same low water activity that normally makes plain honey so shelf-stable. So instead of leaving fresh garlic and honey together at room temperature for weeks, I now use a gentle hot-infusion method.
And no, we aren’t boiling the honey. We are gently heating it to at least 140°F while it infuses.
What You Need
● 1 pound (16 ounces by weight) honey
● Up to 2.8 ounces fresh garlic cloves
● Clean glass jar with a tight-fitting lid
● Kitchen scale
● Instant-read or candy thermometer
● Small saucepan
● Fine-mesh strainer or cheesecloth
Why the amounts matter
Fresh garlic is considered a high-moisture, low-acid ingredient. Current food-safety guidance recommends that ingredients like fresh garlic make up no more than 15% of the finished honey infusion by weight.
An easy ratio to remember is:
For every 16 ounces of honey, use no more than 2.8 ounces of fresh garlic.
This is one recipe where I would actually pull out the kitchen scale rather than eyeballing it.
How to Make It
1. Weigh your honey.
Add 16 ounces of honey by weight to a small saucepan.
2. Prepare the garlic.
Weigh up to 2.8 ounces of peeled fresh garlic.
Lightly crush or chop the garlic. Breaking the cloves increases the surface area and allows the flavor and garlic compounds to move into the honey more readily.
3. Heat the honey.
Gently warm the honey to at least 140°F.
Keep your thermometer in the mixture so you can monitor the temperature.
You do not need to boil the honey, and I would avoid overheating it.
4. Add the garlic.
Add your prepared garlic to the warmed honey.
Keep the entire mixture at 140°F or above while it infuses, stirring occasionally.
You can infuse it for approximately 10 minutes to 2 hours, depending on how strong you want the garlic flavor. I usually prefer a shorter, gentle infusion and taste as I go.
5. Strain it.
This part is important.
While the honey is still warm, pour it through a fine-mesh strainer or several layers of cheesecloth.
Remove all of the fresh garlic pieces.
Unlike my older method, I don’t leave the garlic cloves sitting in the finished jar.
6. Bottle it.
Pour the strained infused honey into a clean glass jar and seal it with a tight-fitting lid.
Allow it to cool before storing.
What About Raw Honey?
I love raw honey, but heating honey to 140°F means I would no longer describe the finished product as completely “raw.”
For this recipe, food safety matters more to me than preserving a raw-food label.
If you specifically want to make a room-temperature infusion without heating your honey, use completely dried ingredients rather than fresh garlic. A dried ingredient should be truly dry and brittle, with no pockets of moisture.
One Important Change From Traditional Honey-Garlic Recipes
You may have heard that bubbles in a garlic-honey jar mean that the fermentation is “working.”
For this preparation, bubbling is not something I’m looking for.
Current food-safety guidance considers bubbling or a sour smell in infused honey a sign of fermentation/spoilage. If your finished honey begins bubbling or develops a sour or unusual odor, discard it.
And because potentially harmful microorganisms don’t necessarily announce themselves with a bad smell or appearance, I don’t use smell alone as my safety test.
How We Use It
I love using the finished garlic-infused honey:
● By the spoonful
● Stirred into warm—not boiling—tea
● Drizzled over roasted vegetables
● Whisked into salad dressing
● Added to marinades
● Drizzled over toast
Remember, this is a food and a family kitchen tradition—not a treatment for an infection or a substitute for medical care.
A Note About Babies
Never give honey or foods containing honey to a baby under 12 months old.
Honey can naturally contain Clostridium botulinum spores. Older children and adults can generally consume these spores without a problem, but an infant’s developing intestinal microbiome makes babies uniquely vulnerable to infant botulism.
Heating or pasteurizing honey does not make honey safe for an infant under one.
Why I Changed My Recipe
One of my biggest beliefs around lower-toxin living and raising children is that we don’t have to be afraid of new information.
We learn, and then we adjust.
Traditional practices can be beautiful and valuable, but when better food-safety information becomes available, I’m going to use it.
So our family still has its honey garlic jar every cold season.
We just make it a little differently now.
Sources
Oregon State University Extension Service. Infusing Honey Safely. Peer-reviewed food-safety guidance, 2026.