Honey Garlic Sauce

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Today, it’s all about my sticky honey garlic sauce - a delicious recipe based on a store-bought sauce.

The first time I posted this recipe - over a decade ago - it was shortly after I’d done a ton of work to replicate it from a retail product - VH Honey Garlic Cooking Sauce.

It’s a popular cooking sauce in Canada, really great for quick dinners on busy nights. A little goes a long way - and it’s CHEAP!

I had been unable to find anything at all like this delicious sauce while living in Minnesota, and honey garlic wings seemed to just... not be a thing there?

So weird!

While I can usually reproduce a dish off taste alone - intuitively - sometimes it's fun to have to reverse engineer something.

A good example of this was my homemade wine slush mix.

For that, I took clues from the ingredient list and nutritional information on the existing package, and used it as the base for my formulation.

For instance, vitamin C amount per serving helped me ballpark the proper amount of citric acid to use, after figuring out a few conversions.

This sort of problem-solving comes in handy for today's blog.

Note: The LONG post about all of the math that went into this recipe has been moved to below the recipe card, for anyone interested.

I .. May have geeked out a bit more than the average reader cares about, LOL!

Canadian Honey Garlic Sauce

I need to be absolutely clear here: This honey garlic sauce is wildly different from anything called the same in the USA.

Many of the common sauce ingredients in other recipes: garlic powder, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, brown sugar, chili flakes, chicken broth, even fresh ginger - are NOT present in this recipe.

Making this recipe will turn out a very sweet sauce that is a very accurate replica of a specific honey sauce in Canada - and, by extension - Canadian style honey garlic chicken wings.

It’s not as much of a savory sauce as what you may be used to from the average honey garlic chicken recipe, and that’s ok - just know what you’re getting into here!

If you’re into really sweet, sticky honey garlic wings - with a good hit of garlic under a wild amount of sugar - your tastebuds will love this honey sauce.

That said, if you’re more into umami flavors, you might want to use one of the recipes that feature things like soy sauce and Worchestershire.

Don’t hold it against me if you’re not a fan of the source material, please and thank you!

The (Original) Verdict

As it turns out, I was pretty much bang-on for those proportions, and the recipe turned out amazing*!

On first taste, it hit my memory *just* right, and I was transported back to my apartment, circa my early 20s.

To quick stir fry meals thrown together cheaply and easily, when I bothered to take the time.

I was SO busy back then, I'd sew for 16+ hours in a day, skipping meals often. Convenience foods like these bottled sauces were go-to meals, as I had NO time to "properly" cook.

This is not high cuisine, and I have NO idea how it would fit on the American palate - us Canadians tend to have a ridiculous sweet tooth!

Maybe there's a reason it's not available there? Who knows!

For an Ex-pat Canadian, though... the nostalgia that this food evokes brings it to "comfort food" levels, even as a condiment. Isn't taste-memory a funny thing?

Now that you've read through all of that, let me present you with the SUPER simple recipe that resulted.

This beautiful sauce is great as a stir fry sauce, or to cook meatballs or spare ribs in.. yum!

For our first use of it, we simply browned some pork chops, added sliced peppers to the pan, and cooked it for a few minutes.

Then we added about ¾ cup of the sauce and let it cook a few more minutes, and served over rice. Fabulous!

*... although, at $1-something a bottle, I suppose that bribing someone to mail me some could have been an option. Where's the fun in that, though?

Ingredients

This recipe uses only a few simple ingredients, most of which are generally pantry staples. You should have no problem finding these items in any grocery store.

You will need:

Granulated Sugar
Honey
Molasses
Fresh Garlic Cloves
Corn Starch
Lemon Juice
Salt

Variations

While swapping out any of these ingredients will not give you an accurate replica of the source material, it WILL give you another tasty sauce.

A few options:

1 - Instead of lemon juice, feel free to use rice vinegar, apple cider vinegar, white vinegar if needed.

2 - Instead of honey, you can make a maple garlic sauce by swapping the honey - and the molasses, if desired - with the same amount of Pure Maple Syrup.

3 - For a spicy honey garlic sauce, add a little Cayenne Pepper or Red Pepper Flakes along with the initial ingredients.

How to Make Honey Garlic Sauce

The full recipe is in the recipe card towards the end of this post (before the big nerd-out on how I reverse engineered the recipe), here is the pictorial walk through.

Combine sugar, ¼ cup of water, honey, molasses salt, lemon juice, and minced garlic in a small saucepan.

Once mixture boils, turn element down to medium heat and simmer for 5 minutes, to let the flavors combine.

Stir until well incorporated and mixture starts to thicken, about 3-4 minutes. Remove from heat.

At this point, you can use the sauce right away, or cool it to room temperature, transfer to an airtight container and store it in the fridge for use within a couple of days.

Strain out the garlic, or don’t – it’s up to you!

Uses for Honey Garlic Sauce

Honey Garlic Wings

Prepare your wings with whatever cooking process you like - deep fried, baked, or as air fryer wings - Until cooked through.

As you’re cooking the wings, heat up a bit of the honey garlic sauce. (Optional - I just prefer to use warm sauce, to avoid cooling the wings!)

If you fried the wings in hot oil, blot the cooked wings with paper towels to remove excess grease.

Transfer the fully cooked wings to a large bowl, toss with honey garlic sauce.

Serve hot!

Honey Garlic Meatballs

If using premade meatballs, prepare per package directions.

For homemade meatballs, cook your meatballs in a large skillet until they’re browned all around.

Add some honey garlic cooking sauce to the pan, continue to cook until the internal temperature of the meatballs registers 165G, and the sauce has glazed the meatballs.

Serve your honey garlic meatballs with extra sauce, garnish with green onions and/or sesame seeds, if desired.

Honey Garlic Chicken

You can use this honey garlic sauce in place of the cooking sauce in many different chicken recipes, or just marinate and cook it.

Prepare whatever part of the chicken you want - I like to use boneless skinless chicken breasts or chicken thighs - and place in a ziplock baggie.

Cover with the sauce, seal the bag and chill for at least 3 hours - you can marinate it overnight if you want.

Once you’re ready, cook the chicken however you want - in a pan, grilled, in an Instant Pot, in a slow cooker - whatever.

Once cooked, serve over white rice, brown rice - even cauliflower rice. I like to add some broccoli or green beans, to round out the meal.

Note: Marinating and cooking in this also works well for short ribs and pork chops!

Honey Garlic Stir Fry

Cook your choice of meat - sliced chicken, beef, pork, shrimp, etc - in a large skillet until browned on all sides.

Add your choice of stir fry veggies and the honey garlic sauce - as much or as little as you want - and cook until the meat and veggies are cooked through and the sauce is hot.

Serve over your choice of rice or noodles.

Honey Garlic Crispy Tofu

Press the excess water out of a brick of tofu, cut into bite sized cubes.

Toss tofu cubes with a little sesame oil or olive oil, then with about 1 tablespoon corn starch, ½ teaspoon each of garlic powder and onion powder, and ¼ teaspoon each of salt and black pepper.

Once coated, you can cook them one of two ways:

1. Spread on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, bake at 400 F for 30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes or so.

2. Pan fry in a large nonstick skillet, with a little oil.

Once tofu is crispy all around, add to a pan along with some of the honey garlic sauce (if baked), or pour some honey garlic sauce in the pan you cooked it in.

Bring to a simmer, cook until sauce glazes the tofu. Serve hot!

Freeze for Later Use

Once cooled to room temperature, you can divide the sauce up into ice cube trays, and freeze until frozen through.

Pop the frozen cubes out, transfer to a freezer bag, and suck out most of the air.

Keep in the freezer until you’re ready to use it.

This recipe is one of many fantastic Canadian recipes in my cookbook, "More Than Poutine: Favourite Foods from my Home and Native Land”.

"More than Poutine" is a Canadian cookbook like no other - written by a Canadian living away, it includes both traditional home cooking recipes, as well as accurate homemade versions of many of the snacks, sauces, convenience foods, and other food items that are hard to come by outside of Canada! Order your copy through Amazon, or through any major bookseller!

More Replica Recipes

What's the fun in being able to accurately reproduce restaurant or retail food recipes by taste / memory, if you don't share? Here are some of my favourites:

Beep Replica Recipe
Cactus Cut Potatoes & Dip
Clodhoppers Candy
Diana Sauces Recipes
Dill Pickle Cream Cheese Dip
Homemade Deep N Delicious Cake
Homemade Marshmallow Cones
Moon Mist Ice Cream
Montreal Steak Spice & Marinade
Moroccan Twist Salted Caramel Popcorn (Sauce Goddess)
Sweet Heat Salted Caramel Popcorn (Sauce Goddess)
Taste of India's Chicken Shahi Korma
Trader Joe's Tofu Edamame Nuggets

Share the Love!

Before you chow down, be sure to take some pics of your handiwork! If you Instagram it, be sure to tag me - @CelebrationGenerationCA - or post it to My Facebook Page - so I can cheer you on!

Also, be sure to subscribe to my free monthly email newsletter, so you never miss out on any of my nonsense. Well, the published nonsense, anyway!

Finally, if you love this recipe, please consider leaving a star rating and/or a comment below, and maybe even sharing this post on social media!

Reverse Engineering Honey Garlic Sauce

The other day, one of my tweeps - a fellow Canadian - brought up honey garlic cooking sauce.

It's a popular sauce back home, made by VH. Super cheap, available everywhere... SO not healthy, but SO tasty. Yum. It's not available here, so I end up missing it.

Where my last taste of it was around 5 years ago, it makes it a bit harder for me to replicate on taste. Memories get fuzzy over time, and specific flavor profiles melt into general feelings about the taste.

I could take a wild stab at it and come up with something that tastes great, but it may not be super close to the original.

Without the source material on hand - or at least cataloged in RECENT memory - all I can do is "inspired by".

Of course, that doesn't mean that I can't use science, math, and logic to ensure a good step in the right direction!

A quick search online turns up a few key bits of information: nutritional info, and the actual ingredients list.

Between tidbits such as calories, sodium, and sugars per the specified serving size, knowing what the commercial version had in it - and in order of quantity - and a good memory of the appearance and approximate viscosity... I've got a good set of base parameters to start with!

Per 85 ml (⅓ cup): 260 calories, 540 mg sodium, 64 g carb, 55 g sugars

Ingredients: Sugar, Water, Honey, Molasses, Dehydrated Garlic, Salt, Caramel, Hydrolyzed Soy Protein, Corn Syrup, Glucose-Fructose, Citric Acid, Sodium Benzoate

1. Ascertain the Role of Each Ingredient

This is not only in nutritional terms - say, carbs - but also function:

Sugar: Volume, carbs, sugars, flavor, viscosity
Water: Volume
Honey: Volume, carbs, sugars, flavor, viscosity
Molasses: Volume, carbs, sugars, flavor, viscosity, color, slightly to sodium
Garlic: Flavor
Salt: Flavor, sodium
Caramel: Color
Hydrolyzed Soy Protein: Emulsification / thickening
Corn Syrup: Carbs, sugars
Glucose-Fructose: This is what "high fructose corn syrup" is called in Canada. Carbs, sugars.
Citric Acid: Flavor
Sodium Benzoate: Preservative, to impede microorganisms

2. Narrow it All Down

Knowing all of that, I need to narrow the ingredients down for home use.

What we'll be keeping:

Sugar, water, honey, molasses, garlic, salt

What We'll be Ditching:

- Caramel: It's unnecessary.

- Hydrolyzed soy protein: Not accessible for home use.

- Corn syrup: Unnecessary - was used as cheap alternative to honey.

- Glucose-Fructose: Comparable to honey in many technical ways, it's used as a cheap way to "stretch" honey out in commercial use.

- Citric Acid: There are more accessible alternatives

- Sodium Benzoate: Not readily available, unnecessary for home use.

What Functionality I Need to Replace:

- Hydrolyzed soy protein: Emulsification

- Citric acid: Flavor

3. Figure Out the Base of the Recipe, Volumetricly

Canadian food labeling law requires that all ingredients be listed in "descending order of proportion by weight".

Knowing that, I can look at the list and figure out where the cutoff would be for ingredients contributing significantly to the volume of the sauce.

Knowing from experience that there is a fair amount of garlic in the sauce, I would normally consider that the "final" ingredient in our initial problem-solving.

However, since it contributes only to flavor, I'm going to ignore it for now. That means that for the volumetric base of our recipe, we are focusing on sugar, water, honey, and molasses.

4. Figure Out Weights and Measures

A quick search online reveals that 1 cup of sugar is generally understood to weigh 7 oz, or 200g.

One cup of water weighs about 8.3 oz, or 237 grams. One cup of honey weighs about 12 oz, or 340 g.

For the sake of ease, I'll convert the nutrition facts to reflect 1 cup of sauce: 780 calories, 1620 mg sodium, 192 g carb, 165 g sugars

Guessing to See What Works

If we were to use equal quantities of sugar, honey, and water as a starting point, the nutritional info for one cup of it would be:

595 calories
158 g carbs
147 g sugars

½ cup sugar
⅓ cup water
¼ cup honey
2 tablespoon molasses

... which adds up to 1.3 cups.

570 cal
150g carbs
144g sugars

... which is close enough for me to get to the kitchen and start tinkering around. Well, after we figure out the sodium, anyway!

The base ingredients don't contribute significantly to sodium content - about 13 mg total - so this will pretty much be coming straight from the salt we'll be adding.

The container of salt I'll be using indicates that it contains 590 mg of sodium per ¼ cup.

Due to the commercial nature of the source material, I'll be aiming low - ¼ tsp, or 1180 mg - and will add extra salt only if needed.