The classic condiment for Thanksgiving and Christmas, cranberry sauce, is delicious with poultry, game and even pork. Also wonderful with cheeses instead of chutney.
Cranberry facts
Cranberries are very aesthetically pleasing though they don’t look very edible. They are more like some winter berries picked off a garden shrub in the corner. They are actually safe to eat raw but utterly disgusting (trust me – I’ve tried) thanks to their high tannin content: extremely bitter, albeit health-beneficial, compounds also found in red wine, dark chocolate and unripe fruit.
Luckily, those health benefits are not entirely lost when cooking cranberries, so we can safely spoon cranberry sauce over our turkey at Christmas, in the knowledge that it’s good for us. Apart from the sugar it contains.
But the sugar is essential, otherwise a sauce or any cranberry preparation would be too pungently tart. You might notice that dried cranberries even from health stores are usually sweetened with apple juice – still sugary, but less refined.
Fresh or frozen?
The cranberries for the sauce are best fresh, and at this time of the year they are available in British supermarkets. Any other time you need to rely on frozen ones, and even those might be hard to procure. That’s because they are grown in and imported from North America, and their season coincides conveniently with Thanksgiving and Christmas: October to December.
You can use frozen cranberries in this recipe, but because of resulting higher water content, simmer the sauce a little bit longer.
How to make cranberry sauce
The sauce is unbelievably easy to make and a lovely addition to Christmas dinner. My recipe is based on one from BBC Good Food, slightly modified by the addition of spices – it makes it smell and taste this little bit more Christmassy.
The base is a very simple syrup made with muscovado sugar, for the malty, rich flavour, boiled with orange juice. The juice may be freshly squeezed or out of a carton, but make sure it’s not sweetened.
Rinsed cranberries are added to the syrup together with the spices, and they need to simmer for about ten minutes, until they start to pop and burst.
And that’s it. It now should cool down completely, and as it does, it also thickens.
Make-ahead
It can be made well ahead of time as it stores well in the fridge. If you prefer it a little tarter, reduce the amount of sugar.
It is great with turkey, goose, duck and game and is also marvellous to serve alongside baked brie or camembert.
More cranberry recipes
Thick and flavoursome cranberry butter is like cranberry sauce on steroids and it can be used as jam, jelly or confiture too. There's no dairy in fruit butters!
Cranberry and walnut bread made with fresh or frozen cranberries, chopped walnuts and orange juice and zest, it has intense flavour, gorgeous cranberry tang and crunchy sugar topping.
Mini cranberry pies, shortcrust pastry made from scratch filled with easy to make cranberry butter instead of traditional mincemeat. Mince pies? Make mine a cranberry this Christmas!
More Christmas dinner recipes
Boneless turkey breast fillet butterflied, stuffed and rolled up to a perfect roast joint for Christmas. Did I say how easy it is to carve?
Brussels sprout heads and Brussels sprout tops, two side dishes out of a sprout stick. The sprouts are roasted in olive oil until caramelised and gorgeous, and the tops are blanched and tossed with toasted almonds.
Christmas pork, apricot and fig stuffing for turkey, duck, goose or chicken. This stuffing has a wonderful flavour, sweet with the dried fruit and spiced with nutmeg and mace. but is very easy to make.