what is the difference between honey and syrups or just thickened sugar water?
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Honey and natural syrups aren’t just sugar and water, there are also small amount of flavor molecule present. This is why honey from clover flowers tastes different than honey from wildflowers, which also tastes different than honey from pine flowers, etc. Also, this is why honey tastes different than maple syrup. If there weren’t flavor molecules, honey and syrup would differ only by relative sweetness.
These flavor differences could be just one or two molecules, but are likely several dozen to as many as hundreds. When discussing flavor, we usually use the expression “flavor profile” because it describes what is actually going on: flavor is the result of many different molecules and their relative levels of abundance.
Perhaos the most well know example of this is truffle oil, which is almost always made from synthetic truffle flavoring. When the food chemist’s do is find the most abundant flavor molecule, and produce it in a lab. There is absolutely no difference between the lab produced version and the natural version, except the lab only makes the one molecule and doesn’t recreate the entire flavor profile. This is why people often describe truffle oil as “flat” or “one-dimensional” because there’s literally only one flavor molecule activating your taste buds,and not the dozens to hundreds you are accustomed to
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