The weather has been wild here in Colorado, tipping into summer temperatures – even in the high country – enough to make us feel like we’ve skipped winter, and spring and dropped right into summer. And I can feel my body struggling to catch up; clearing the stagnation of winter, lightening up, loosening it’s grasp…and I’m doing all I can to help it. Which means, making this Raw Honey-Rhubarb Compote.
Kapha is the dosha made of earth and water. Its job is to provide structure, lubrication, stability, and cohesion — it holds the body together, cushions the joints, maintains the mucous membranes, and governs growth and immunity. In balance, kapha shows up as groundedness, endurance, calm, and generous energy. It’s the dosha that builds, sustains and supports and it’s INCREDIBLY important for us to carry kapha with us — especially as active humans.
The problem is seasonal accumulation. Kapha naturally increases through the cold, wet, heavy months of winter — we eat more, move less, and the body responds by holding on. Further, the body wants and needs this cushioned layer to help keep us warm, keep our hibernation productive and our bodies healthy. But, by late winter and early spring, as kapha builds in the natural world around us, that protective accumulation tips into excess: congestion, heaviness, sluggish digestion, low motivation, water retention, and a kind of thick mental fog. Spring’s warmth and moisture can actually aggravate kapha further before it clears, which is why early spring is the classic kapha season — and why Ayurveda treats it as a time for deliberate clearing rather than continued nourishment.
The qualities of kapha — heavy, cold, oily, slow, smooth, dense, soft — tell you exactly what it needs to come back into balance: the opposite. Light, warm, dry, sharp, rough, stimulating…and honey weirdly falls into this supportive catagory.
…honey is the exception to the “no-sweets for kapha” rule.
Most sweeteners increase kapha — they’re heavy, building, and cooling. Honey is the outlier.
Ayurveda classifies raw honey as lekhana in Sanskrit — which translates to “scraping” because this incredible substance has the superpower of scraping and clearing the channels of the body, rather than congesting them. Instead of adding bulk or moisture to the tissues, honey has a dry, light, heating and penetrating quality that moves through the channels and actually helps lift and clear accumulated material. This is on account of the fact that honey has already been digested by the enzymes of bees – effectively “fermenting” it ahead of our consumption. It’s warming, it’s light relative to other sweets, and it supports agni rather than dampening it. Honey is actually used as a remedy for diabetes in Ayurveda – the one sweetner that isn’t contraindicated for kapha – because, used appropriately, it actively helps reduce it.
The important caveat: this only applies to raw or gently warmed honey. Heating honey significantly is considered in Ayurveda to transform its qualities — the healing properties of the raw honey are sacrificed, the scraping action is lost and it becomes harder to metabolize, more clogging than clearing.
So how the honey enters the compote matters. Stirred in off heat, or used as a finishing drizzle, it keeps its functional properties intact.
Is sweet, tart, bright, decadent and frankly, perfection in my book. AND, it hits kapha’s need for opposites at almost every turn.
Rhubarb is sour, astringent, light, and dry — it stimulates the liver and large intestine, moves stagnation, and clears ama (accumulated metabolic waste) from the digestive tract. It’s one of the more potent digestive stimulants available as a food rather than a supplement.
Strawberry adds gentle sour-sweet balance with a light, slightly rough quality. It brings enough moisture to make the compote feel like food rather than medicine, without the heavy, building character that would work against kapha.
Ginger is the through-line. Pungent and warming, it kindles agni directly, clears dampness, and improves the bioavailability and action of everything it’s paired with. It’s the herb Ayurveda reaches for first when kapha needs moving.
Honey, as above, scrapes and clears rather than builds — and its warmth and lightness support rather than suppress the digestive fire that ginger is trying to kindle.
The dominant tastes in this compote — sour, pungent, astringent — are exactly the three tastes that reduce kapha. The qualities are light, warm, and stimulating. And the timing is right: this is spring food, eaten when the body is ready to shed what winter built.
We enjoy this gorgeous compote on toast instead of jam, with granola or chia pudding, or over a warm bowl of porridge.
AND, we use it whenever someone has a cough, cold or feels congested or puffy, during the spring months when rhubarb is in season and kapha is running rampant, and anytime we want to feel light, and clear in body and mind.
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