Both of those products are pretty thick/sticky by themselves but together create something that behaves much more ‘watery’.
In: Chemistry
Allright I had to do a bunch of googling to make certain that I was right about this. Basically what happens is that several of the chemical substances in honey have functional groups react with some of the chemical substances in Barbecue sauce and that this creates water as well as some other stuff. When mixing honey and Barbecue sauce you have to heat it and boil it to evaporate off the excess water created by the mixture.
As u/pulpinator pointed out, it’s probably due to you basically diluting one in the other. Assuming your statement to be true:
The sugars are further apart from each other so the honey/sauce combo gets thinner or less viscous than either component on their own. If both honey and bbq sauce have different sugars in different ratios, putting together in one delicious honey bbq sauce changes how those sugars organize and see each other.
My reasoning:
Relevant plot from RG. At high concentration, sucrose has highest relative viscosity followed by glucose then fructose (and honey). Since both products have different sugars, you effectively dilute them to some extent in the combo sauce, thereby lowering the viscosity.
https://images.app.goo.gl/VRUYAFTaaus1UfEo6
Honey dissolves into the water in the barbecue sauce. This increases the volume of water and makes the mixture runny.
This also happens when you try to make honey mustard with regular mustard and honey. You need a thickening agent to make the mixture more “saucy.”
I once saw a demonstration. 50mL of acetone and 50mL of water (or ethanol?) were mixed and resulted in 85mL of liquid.
The volume should have been 100mL?
It seems that this is relevant.
I think I may have figured it out doing a brief search of ingredients in barbecue sauce and using my limited understanding of chemistry. Barbecue sauce often contains vinegar and vinegar dissolves sugar. The dissolved sugar will bond with whatever water is present and this will break up hydrogen bonds holding the sauces together creating a more watery, easily dispersed solution.
So I make a honey plus apple cider vinegar mixture and I believe the vinegar breaks it down. Heck, it’s how I don’t spend forever mixing them and pouring the honey mixture in to a food processor. Over time, the honey becomes thinner and thiner.
Firstly, honey, sauces, and most sticky liquids are “thixotropic” – stirring them makes them easier to stir. This will be part of the reason the mix becomes more watery.
As an educated guess, I think the honey is probably also getting mechanically dispersed in the bbq sauce and forming something akin to a colloid. To picture this, imagine that you mix honey with a lot of sand. Eventually the honey is just a bunch of discrete sticky droplets, all coated in sand and rolling freely over one another. (Also note that when particles in a system are the same shape, I recall the system is more viscous than when their sizes are more varied. The overall mixture of “sand” and “honey” might end up less viscous than either individually.)
Now, imagine molecules of liquid surrounding the honey in place of the sand – that’s a colloid.
I’ve also definitely seen a demo of two viscous polymers mixing together to form a thin solution, but I don’t believe the interactions involved have jack shit to do with this and i cannot find any source on it. I am so sorry to give such vague information
Finally I would also like to note that there should not be a chemical reaction occuring to dehydrate either of them. I’d really like to hear what kind of reactions are being proposed. Edit: For sure, though, sounds like vinegar+sugar has an impact. edit2: oh, okay, sounds like it might not? A mystery lmao
What you need to add, friend, is some xanthan gum. Works like a charm to thicken anything.
The BBQ sauce is breaking down the sugar in the honey. That’s why you are using is too. Just honey on a burger would be pretty dang sweet.
I’m a food technologists and I’ve worked on a bunch of high sugar sauces. It can be a bit of a challenge to get them thick enough. Here’s what is usually going on in a situation like this. Honey is very high in sugar, which is one of the reasons it is thick – it is about 70% sugar by weight. Creamed honey has a bunch of tiny crystals in it which makes it even thicker, they act like particles that interact and thicken up the mixture. A BBQ sauce on the other hand will have some kind of thickener in it, but a relatively low total solids percentage, maybe around 15% if it also has sugar in it. The thickener might be vegetable gums or starch, or both. These have very long chain molecules in them that when hydrated, thicken up the water in the sauce. The water sticks to the surface of the molecules and the molecules interact, kind of like sticky spaghetti in a pot. When you mix the two together the water from the sauce will dilute the honey making the mix about 40-50% solids if it’s a 50/50 mix. The sugar from the honey gets between the long molecules of the starch or gum so they don’t interact quite as well, kind of lubricating them, kind of like if you stir in pasta sauce to cooked spaghetti, it lets the strands of spaghetti slide against each other, so you can stir them around more freely.
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