The short answer: if you paid for the number on the label, do not cook with it. Bake manuka into a cake and you have made a cake with expensive honey in it. It will taste good. It will not be manuka in any sense you paid for.
Nobody selling manuka has much reason to tell you that, which is probably why so few do.
What you are actually buying
Manuka is graded on MGO, methylglyoxal, measured in milligrams per kilogram. It is a compound. It does not arrive in the hive. Tea tree nectar carries DHA, and the DHA slowly turns into MGO in the drum and then in the bottle, over months.
That is the part worth knowing. MGO is not fixed. It is a number that moves, and what moves it is temperature.
What the lab work shows
The honey lab at the University of the Sunshine Coast put Australian manuka through it for the honey bee products CRC. Three findings:
- At about 22 degrees, room temperature, MGO climbs over twelve to eighteen months. A fresh batch has not reached its number yet.
- At 37 degrees, a hot shed in summer, MGO rises briefly and then falls away. HMF, the international marker for how much heat a honey has copped, passes the 40mg/kg export limit in about ten weeks.
- At 65 degrees for ten days, most of the MGO is gone.
Bioactive components of Australian manuka honeys and nectars, CRC for Honey Bee Products, 2022.
Those are storage temperatures, not cooking. Nobody has run the study on a ham glaze and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But 65 degrees is barely warm to the touch. A cup of tea is near boiling. An oven is 180. If ten days of gentle warmth wipes it out, twenty minutes under a grill is not leaving it intact.
What is fine
- Warm toast. Butter it, let it stand half a minute, then the honey.
- Porridge and yoghurt, off the heat.
- A drink you have let cool to the temperature you would actually drink it at. Boiling water straight onto it is the common mistake.
- Cheese, fruit, a spoon.
Rule of thumb: if you could hold a finger in it, the manuka is fine.
Does heating ruin it?
No. Warm manuka is still honey and still good honey. It is just honey. The only thing you have lost is the thing you paid the premium for.
So what do you cook with?
Honey. Our Queensland Honey is the one for the pan, the tray and the mixing bowl. It changes through the year with whatever the bees were working, which is the point of it. Our bees had a hard season, so there is less of it than usual and it will run out.
We would rather say this now than sell you a kilo of manuka you bake.
Every batch of our manuka is tested on its own, and the result goes on the lid of the bottle and on its own batch page. The number is the number. We do not dress it up with what it is supposed to do for you, and we would be careful of anyone who does.
Honey is not suitable for babies under 12 months.