Both of those products are pretty thick/sticky by themselves but together create something that behaves much more ‘watery’.
In: Chemistry
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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