Simple, sweet, and a great old-fashioned remedy for soothing a sore throat or cough! This Homemade Honey and Onion Cough Syrup needs just 2 ingredients and 36 hours to come together. From there, it’s a potent, effective remedy for mild coughs or sore throats.
A Quick Look At The Recipe
- ⏲️Ready In: 36 hours
- 👪Serves: 12
- 🍽 Calories: 30 kcals
- 📋 Main Ingredients: Onion and honey
- 📖 Dietary Notes: Dairy-free and gluten-free
- ⭐ Why You'll Love It: 2 ingredients are all you need for this easy cough remedy.
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Soothe a sore throat and relieve a scratchy cough with this homemade honey cough syrup! A cool thing happens when you soak chopped onions in raw honey: it liquifies the honey and makes for the easiest cough syrup!
I’ve been making some form of homemade cough remedy for ages, everything from homemade cough drops, elderberry cough drops, and even a honey garlic elixir.
Raw honey is gold for soothing a sore throat, and the antibacterial properties of onion make this syrup extremely effective.
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💭Why You’ll Love This Recipe
Easy to make: With just 2 ingredients, you literally can’t go wrong whipping it up. The hardest part is waiting.
Effective: These ingredients have been used for generations and generations to relieve scratchy throats.
Versatile: This cough syrup recipe can easily be varied for different flavors.
Tastes great: With honey as the base, even kids don’t mind taking a spoonful of this cough syrup.
Ingredients You Need
Pretty straightforward with only 2 ingredients, so you should have everything you need!
Honey: Just any store-bought honey won’t do the trick here. You need to use raw, unpasteurized honey to maximize its effectiveness. And if you notice in the pictures, the honey is brown. This is because after chatting to a beekeeper last year, I learned that buckwheat honey is the most effective honey at relieving cough and sore throat symptoms due to its potency.
Onions: Any onions will work for the cough syrup, but the type of onion you choose will change the flavor a bit. Red onions will be spicier, and sweet onions obviously sweeter. If you’re specifically making it with kids in mind, use a sweet onion so that the flavor masks a bit.
See the recipe card for full information on ingredients and quantities.
Flavor Variations
You can adjust this honey and onion cough syrup recipe as needed with a few of the swaps below.
Garlic: Add 1 tablespoon of chopped garlic to the mix and strain out like you do the onions. Know that the flavor of the syrup won’t be as sweet but it will have more anti-bacterial benefits.
Ginger: Another great ingredient for the immune system (and why I use it in my turmeric protein shake with ginger), add 1 tablespoon of grated or sliced ginger with the onions.
Herbs and spices: You can easily spice up the cough honey with different herbs or edible weeds to give it unique benefits and tastes.
Cinnamon: Either infuse a cinnamon stick into the honey with the onions, or add ground cinnamon to the honey mixture before you store it in the fridge.
How To Make It Into an Old-Fashioned Cough Syrup Recipe
Once you have the honey onion syrup, you can easily make it into an old-fashioned recipe. There are two ways:
Lemon and honey: Mix the honey syrup in with some freshly squeezed lemon juice for more antibacterial properties. You can take a spoonful like this or whisk it all into some warm water to sip on.
Whiskey-based: The other option is mixing the honey onion syrup with some lemon juice, water, and whiskey. Basically, you want to heat the mixture together in a small pot on the stove until hot and combined. This soothing mixture makes an old-fashioned cough syrup recipe that all grandmas used to make.
How To Make Homemade Honey Onion Cough Syrup
Step 1: Chop the onion and put it into the bottom of a wide-mouth jar.
Step 2: Pour the honey over top and make sure it coats the onion.
Step 3: Put a lid on it and let it sit for 24-36 hours, you’ll notice it starts to get more liquidy.
Step 4: Pour the mixture through a fine mesh sieve to strain out the onions. Keep the liquid honey and use it as needed.
Hack: if you’re short on time and don’t want to wait for the onions to break down the honey, place the jar in a small pot of water over low heat. Let it sit for an hour or so stirring frequently until the onions break down. Don't heat it up too much though or you'll destroy the antibacterial properties of the honey.
Expert Tips To Make It
Make sure that the onions are completely covered with honey, or it won’t break down. Know that kids under one shouldn't have honey.
As the homemade cough remedy sits, the honey will lose its thickness. This is what you want!
Know that you can’t mess this recipe up. The amounts don’t matter, it’s just what you have on hand. So long as the honey coats the onions, you’re good.
I would refrain from adding lemon juice to the mixture. Though lemon juice (and lemon zest) is amazing for coughs, adding a liquid to the honey could make it spoil earlier. If you want to mix in lemon juice, make it into the old-fashioned cough syrup recipe at the bottom of the post.
This cough syrup does have a faint onion taste. If you like a really, really sweet profile, use more honey.
How To Store It
Storing honey and onion cough syrup is simple. Once it's done sitting, store the honey onion syrup in a sealed jar in the fridge. Here, it will stay fresh for up to 3 weeks.
The other option would be to strain the onions out and then freeze the cough syrup in mini silicone molds. When you have a cough, pop out one of the molds and suck on the honey.
How To Use It
You can use this honey onion syrup a few different ways:
With coughs: Take a spoonful a few times a day if you feel a scratchy throat starting.
Frozen: Freeze the honey cough syrup in small silicone molds so that it’s cold if you have a really bad sore throat. This is what I do with my homemade cough drops.
As a dressing: I whisk this honey syrup in with my Fire Cider recipe and drizzle it on salads for lunch. It’s the BIGGEST antibacterial, immune-boosting, gut-loving punch. Nice flavor too.
A quick reminder that babies under one shouldn’t be given honey. Use this for yourself and older kiddos.
Onion Honey Cough Syrup FAQs
Honey, warm liquids, ginger, lemon, and garlic are all great ingredients to help relieve light coughs and scratchy throats. You can use them by making them into a homemade cough syrup recipe or by steeping them in a tea.
Honey is naturally soothing for sore throats, and if you purchase unpasteurized, raw honey, it can have its own antibacterial properties. Onion is known for its antiviral properties and has even been said to help clear mucous. The combination of onion and honey is a potent and effective one.
The darker the honey, the better it is for a cough or sore throat. This is why buckwheat honey is the best choice for homemade cough syrup. Make sure to use raw, unpasteurized honey to reap the benefits, though.
Once the onion honey cough syrup is made, if stored in the fridge, it will stay fresh for up to 3 weeks. Of course, you can make it last longer by straining out the onion and freezing the honey into silicone molds to use as cough drops.
If you tried this Homemade Honey and Onion Syrup Recipe or any other recipe on my blog, please leave a 🌟 star rating and let me know how it goes!
Onion and Honey Cough Syrup
Video
Equipment
Ingredients
- ¼ cup Onion peeled and chopped
- ⅓ cup Honey raw and unpasteurized
Instructions
- Peel the onion and chop it into small chunks. Put it into the bottom of a wide-mouth jar.
- Pour the honey over top and make sure it coats the onion.
- Put a lid on it and let it sit for 24-36 hours, you’ll notice it starts to get more liquidy.
- Pour the mixture through a fine mesh sieve to strain out the onions. Keep the liquid honey and use it as needed.
Notes
Disclaimer:
Nutrition values are estimates only, using online calculators. Please verify using your own data"
Nutrition
Shelby S says
I love that this needs only 2 ingredients to come together and is so effective!