A Sweet New Year: Choosing Honey for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot

The holidays run for three weeks this year, and each one asks something different of the jar.

For a few weeks each fall, honey moves from the back of the pantry to the middle of the table.

The Jewish High Holidays begin at sundown on Friday, September 11 this year, and the honey stays out for the better part of a month after that. Rosh Hashanah falls on September 12 and 13. Yom Kippur is September 21. Sukkot runs from September 25 through October 2. Each one is a different meal with a different job for the honey to do.

Most households reach for whatever jar is already in the cupboard, and there is nothing wrong with that. But honey is not one flavor. There are more than three hundred distinct honey varieties in the United States alone, and the distance between a pale clover and a dark buckwheat is about the distance between a Riesling and a Cabernet. Same category, entirely different behavior at the table.

Foxadise Farms is a curator. Every jar on our shelves comes from an independent American producer we have vetted, which is why a Wisconsin clover, a Florida tupelo, and a California black sage can arrive together in one order. Here is how we would put them to use this month.

A note on certification

Pure honey is considered inherently kosher in Jewish tradition. Nothing is added, and nothing is removed, so the honey itself requires no supervision. What certification covers is everything the honey touches before it reaches the jar: the holding tanks, the bottling lines, the temperatures involved in liquefying it, and any equipment shared with other products. For honey with something added, a hot honey or a flavored cream, certification also confirms that the added ingredients meet the standard.

The producers we work with hold certification through three agencies: Kosher Supervision of America, Quality Kosher Supervision, and OK Kosher. Certifications are renewed annually and apply to specific products, so rather than list them alongside every honey in this article, we keep the certified selection gathered in one collection and maintain it there. If certification matters in your kitchen, that is the reliable place to look, and the mark itself is printed on the jar.

Rosh Hashanah: the dipping bowl

Apples and honey, and in many homes a round challah dipped in honey instead of salt.

This is the one place where restraint wins. The honey is there to sweeten the apple, not to argue with it, so you want something pale, mild, and clean on the finish. A big assertive honey will bully the fruit, and you will taste the honey instead of the apple, which is backward.

Clover is the classic here for good reason. Honey Acres has been in Ashippun, Wisconsin since 1852, five generations of the same family, and their bees work roughly eighteen hundred hives spread across farms within forty miles of the property. The clover that comes out of it is soft, floral, and about as unassertive as honey gets.

Orange blossom is the other strong option. It is a little brighter, faintly citrusy, and it plays well against a tart apple. If your apples are on the sweeter side, orange blossom gives the bowl a lift that clover will not.

Acacia is the third name worth knowing, and it may be the best answer of the three. It is the palest and most neutral honey in common circulation, mild enough that it sweetens the apple without leaving any flavor of its own behind. It also stays liquid and clear in the jar rather than setting up, which matters when the bowl sits out on the table all evening. If someone at your table claims not to really like honey, this is the jar that tends to change their mind.

The honey cake wants the opposite

Honey cake is where most people go wrong, and it is an understandable mistake. The instinct is to reach for the good light honey, the one that tastes best off a spoon. But a cake is full of flour, eggs, coffee, and spice, and a delicate honey vanishes into all of it. What comes out of the oven is a brown cake that tastes vaguely sweet and not much else.

Dark honey is traditional for lekach for a reason. Buckwheat is the strongest thing we carry: molasses dark, malty, almost savory, with a finish closer to a stout than to a spoonful of clover. In a cake it survives the flour, and it survives the spice. One jar will make several cakes, and you will taste it in every one.

Wildflower is the middle option if buckwheat sounds like more than you want. Honey Acres bottles theirs from aster, goldenrod, and other late-season blooms, so it comes out darker and fuller than a clover without going all the way to buckwheat.

Yom Kippur: before and after

Yom Kippur begins at sundown on Sunday, September 20 and ends at nightfall on Monday, September 21. The fast itself is obviously not a honey occasion. The two meals bracketing it are.

The meal before the fast tends toward the plain and the unsalted, and a mild honey stirred into tea or spread on bread suits that better than anything sharp.

Break-fast is the real one. Bagels, spreads, dairy, and a table full of people who have not eaten in twenty-five hours and would like something sweet immediately. Honey creams are made for exactly this. Honey Acres controls the crystallization so the honey sets into a thick, spreadable consistency instead of a runny one, which means it goes onto a bagel like butter and stays there. Put a jar out next to the cream cheese and watch which one empties first.

Sukkot: the hosting holiday

Sukkot runs from September 25 through October 2, and the character of it is completely different. Meals move outside, guests come and go, and the food gets more casual. This is where honey stops being ceremonial and starts being useful.

Wildflower hot honey belongs here. Over a cheese board, across roasted vegetables, on fried chicken. We keep it well away from the Rosh Hashanah table, where the entire point is sweetness, but a week later it earns its place.

Black sage is worth knowing about too. It is pale, clean, and unusually mild, and it is the kind of West Coast honey that simply does not turn up on shelves east of the Rockies.

The jar you bring to someone else’s table

Honey is an obvious gift this time of year, and the trouble with an obvious gift is that it occurs to everyone. The host ends up with four jars of the same supermarket clover and nowhere to put them.

Tupelo solves that. It comes from white tupelo trees in the river basins of the Florida panhandle; the bloom lasts about three weeks in the spring, and a bad stretch of weather shortens it further. It resists crystallizing because of how much fructose is in it, so it stays clear and liquid in the jar far longer than most honey does. Most people have never tasted it. That is precisely the point of bringing it.

There is a second kind of gift honey, and it works on the opposite principle. Savannah Honey is a Southern blend rather than a single variety, floral and full with a clean finish, drawn from the magnolias and other flowering trees around its home city. What it has going for it is legibility. The jar reads as a gift on sight, and the name tells the host where it came from before they have opened it.

Tupelo is the one nobody has. Savannah is the one everybody understands immediately. Which you bring depends on whether your host would rather be surprised or would rather have something they can set straight on the table.

Three weeks, not two days

The honey stays on the table longer than most people expect. Rosh Hashanah brings it out, the break-fast after Yom Kippur keeps it there, Sukkot puts it to work, and on Simchat Torah in early October there is an old custom of putting a little honey on the letters of the alphabet for children who are just beginning to learn, so that learning starts out sweet.

One jar can cover all of it. Three or four cover it better.

A good and sweet year to everyone celebrating.

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Quick reference table

Occasion	Honey	Producer	Why this one
Apples and challah	Clover	Honey Acres (WI)	Soft and mild. Sweetens without competing.
Apples and challah	Orange Blossom	Honey Acres / Savannah Bee	Brighter and citrusy. Good against tart apples.
Apples and challah	Acacia	Smiley Honey	Palest and most neutral. Stays liquid in the bowl.
Honey cake	Buckwheat	Honey Acres (WI)	Dark and malty. Survives flour, coffee, and spice.
Honey cake	Wildflower	Honey Acres / Savannah Bee	Fuller than clover, gentler than buckwheat.
Break-fast	Honey Creams	Honey Acres (WI)	Spreadable. Behaves like butter on a bagel.
Break-fast	Basswood	Honey Acres (WI)	Light and fresh. Easy in tea.
Sukkot hosting	Wildflower Hot Honey	Savannah Bee	Heat and sweetness for cheese and vegetables.
Sukkot hosting	Black Sage	Savannah Bee (CA)	Pale and mild. Rare outside the West Coast.
Gifting	Tupelo	Smiley Honey / Savannah Bee	A three-week bloom window. Almost nobody has it.
Gifting	Savannah Honey	Savannah Bee (GA)	A blend, not a variety. The name does the work.