From using chickpea water to make meringues, to turning banana skins into “bacon”* the internet is bursting with increasingly strange-sounding vegan alternatives to traditional foods. In the spring of 2021, while scrolling through the somewhat soul-sucking app that is TikTok, I stumbled across a recipe for making honey out of dandelions. The finished result in the video did admittedly look appealing. It had the same golden glow and gloopy consistency of honey but I found it hard to believe that dandelions could really replicate the flavour of whatever it is that bees do to pollen to make it into our favourite syrupy sweetener. After all, surely the only thing that could taste like honey is...well...honey.

How wrong I was!
Armed with a spare afternoon, a pair of scissors and the desire to feel like a witch in the woods, I trotted off to the patch of land by Fishpool Brook which is practically carpeted in dandelions come April. Snipping the heads off 100 dandelions was a surprisingly quick endeavour and barely made a dent in what must be thousands of the little yellow things.

I can honestly say that my resulting concoction tasted just like the real thing – which led me to realise that the flavour of honey comes far more from the pollen itself than from anything the bees do to it. Admittedly, it doesn’t taste like the most expensive, highest-quality honey you can find and has a somewhat “lighter” flavour than proper honey – but it is nonetheless clearly identifiable as honey and I challenge anyone to detect it as a fraud in a blind tasting.

Dandelions are so often dismissed as weeds that make you wet the bed but they’re one of the most underrated flowers you can find in your garden. Dandelions choose patches of soil that are uninhabitable for other plants. This could be because the soil is too compact (which dandelions will loosen with their roots); or it could be because there is too little calcium in the soil (which dandelions will replenish as their leaves wither and decay). They are also one of the few flowers to provide both pollen and nectar (rather than just one or the other), meaning they are an ideal source of food for many insects. And they’re not only for insects! Apart from making the flowers into honey, the entire dandelion plant – from root to petal – can be eaten, either cooked or raw, and they contain vitamins A, C, E, K, and small amounts of B vitamins, as well as essential minerals like iron, calcium, magnesium and potassium.

The recipe I used was very simple to follow:
1. Place around 100 dandelion heads into a pan and add 350ml water and a few slices of lemon.
2. Simmer for 15 minutes then take off the heat and leave to infuse overnight.
3. Strain the liquid through a muslin cloth, giving it a tight squeeze to get all the dandelion juice out.
4. Weigh the liquid and add the same weight in sugar.
5. Pour the liquid and sugar into a pan, stir until the sugar has dissolved and then simmer for around 30 minutes until you have your desired consistency.

A few tips:
• Don’t wash the dandelions before using them as you’ll wash off the pollen that provides the “honeyish” flavour. Try to pick dandelions in areas away from roads and pollution. The honey will also be heated up to a very high temperature which will sterilise it.
• Do check each dandelion head closely for the little black bugs that love the colour yellow and flick them off before throwing the dandelions into the pan.
• To check if the honey is ready, drop a little onto a cold plate and see how set it looks. Remember the honey will thicken as it cools.
• 100 dandelions should make 1–2 jars.

* I gave banana-skin bacon a go last summer – it probably doesn’t taste a bit like actual bacon but it’s really not as terrible as it sounds.

Genevieve Silk