Cranberry Sauce/Preserves

Welcome back!

Today, we have a key Thanksgiving dish: Cranberry Sauce! Cranberries really are interesting; they aren't the most appetizing when they're raw, so almost all cranberries harvested go towards the production of cranberry juice. Then, the only time they're actually eaten is in dried cranberries or in cranberry sauce, which is restricted to Thanksgiving and Christmas times. That makes it seem like it's not that good, but we actually enjoy the nice, tart flavor.

Cranberry Sauce/Preserves

Ingredients:

12 ounces cranberries
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup orange juice
A pinch of salt

For preserves, you don't need water or orange juice.

Directions:

In a pot, add in the water, orange juice, sugar, and salt. Heat this and stir so the sugar and salt is evenly dissolved. Skip this step for the preserves since there's no water/orange juice. Just combine the sugar and salt with the cranberries.
Add in the cranberries and mix.
Cook this until the cranberries have all "popped" and the mixture is thickened, stirring occasionally. This may take about 10 to 15 minutes. If you're making preserves, be careful so it doesn't burn as there's not a lot of natural water content in the cranberries.
Transfer into sterile jars for storage.

The sauce is pretty liquidy, which is great for topping meats like turkey. However, if you want to make a cranberry jam for something like pastries, then you probably don't want to use that because it'll be rather wet, so we added notes if you wanted to make the drier cranberry preserves.

Also, a note for the amount of sugar: typically, it's about 40% - 50% (if you like it sweeter) of the amount of cranberries used, which is what we did.

-Chefpo

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