I’d like the thank Four Roses, Ooni, and their PR team for sending me this sample with no strings attached.
I am a pizza fanatic. I have it at least once a week and always on Saturday. I choose Saturday because my pizza is not a frozen disk out of the freezer but a fully-from-scratch affair that needs time. To give you a taste of how much I like pizza, we grow about 100 tomato plants of various varieties per summer, with 95% of the harvest going into pizza sauce (the rest goes into my wife’s Bourbon and Beer Chili). I spent twenty years crafting a recipe to my liking, at one point tossing the entire last decade of development when I realized I wasn’t satisfied, then starting from scratch before tweaking it with every batch until I locked in something that I was completely satisfied with. That sauce recipe is a richly spiced Midwestern-style sauce, not a tomato-forward New York/East Coast style. And it was developed to work best with a sourdough crust, whole milk mozzarella, and pepperoni, and to bake well in a home oven.
This is not the style of crust that the people who developed tonight’s pizza topping had in mind. This honey is a partnership between Four Roses and Ooni Pizza Ovens. I thought about getting an Ooni at one point before realizing that my preferred crust isn’t really cut out for that high of heat. People who have them seem to like them, though. And I’m definitely in the “live and let live” camp when it comes to pizza styles.
Here is what the companies have to say about their newest collaboration:
“The bourbon barrel aged honey was crafted in partnership with Bohman Bee Company, specialists in creating local raw honey. Once sourced, the honey was then aged in ex-Four Roses barrels that once aged its Small Batch bourbon. The barrels were freshly dumped and never rinsed to fully impart the richest essence of bourbon. The end result is a honey with tasting notes of ripened red berries and dried spices, perfect for drizzling on freshly made pizza and a sweetener in summer cocktails.”
So if you’ve been around a while, you know I love honey. Almost as much as I love pizza and bourbon. And even though that is the case, I seldom remember that a honey drizzle is the perfect topping for a spicy pepperoni pizza. I am going to need to remember it in the future because this is just the best addition to my home-cooked Saturday pizza. The sweetness of the honey really complements the spicy, salty flavor of the pizza. Because this honey was aged in Four Roses barrels, which can be fruitier than other brands, it brings out the fruity notes of the tomato. It’s really quite tasty.
Of course, if you are not a pizza fan (gasp!) that doesn’t mean that you can’t try this honey. On its own, it has a wonderfully fruity and slightly boozy note from the barrel aging. Not as much as other barrel-aged honey that we’ve covered, but it’s very mellow, much like Four Roses. It also works great as the sweetener in cocktails made with Four Roses. All in all, if you are a Four Roses fan, like I am, give this one a try. It’s available on the Ooni website for $16 for a 10-ounce bottle. I like this one a lot.
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