This Cranberry sauce homemade recipe gives you about 2¼ cups of tart, set sauce in 20 minutes flat. Five minutes of prep. Fifteen on the hob. Then it chills while you get on with something else. The berries set the whole lot themselves. So there’s no gelatine anywhere near my pan and no cornflour either. None of it.
For years I made a slow cooker cranberry chutney for packed lunches. Four hours. For sauce. Does that sound reasonable to you? It isn’t, and I only worked that out the week my slow cooker lid cracked.
So this one replaced it, and nobody here has mentioned the chutney since.
First Sunday of November I doubled it for 9 people at my sister’s, and the pan popped so loudly her dog got up and left the kitchen. Cranberries, sugar and liquid in roughly equal measure will set themselves every single time, as long as you leave the pan alone. Ten minutes of watching and you’ll believe it. Twelve, maybe. It’s very good next to a slow roast turkey breast.
Why I Keep Making This
- The equal cup ratio: one cup (200g) sugar to one cup (240ml) liquid to 340g (12 oz) berries. It holds a spoon trough and doesn’t slide off the plate.
- Eleven minutes, done.
- Fresh orange zest: thin bitter-sweet shreds right through the spoonful. I zest one orange, never two. Because two tips the whole thing into marmalade.
- It keeps for 10 days: sounds minor. Then it’s Thursday, you’re spooning it onto a cheese sandwich, and the ten days starts to matter.
FAQs
Can I make this cranberry sauce homemade recipe with frozen berries
Frozen. Straight in. No thawing and no draining. Tip the bag into the pan and hand it an extra 2 or 3 minutes over the heat. I keep a 340g (12 oz) bag behind the peas from January onward. Because they vanish from the shops in December.
Why is my sauce runny
It isn’t. It’s warm.
How many days does it keep in the fridge
Ten days in a lidded jar, and mine went 13 once with no complaints from anybody. But the surface dulls after a week. Stir it and it comes back.
Is it eaten hot or cold, and does it survive a lunch bag
Cold, almost always. It sits in a small screw-top pot for 5 hours in a bag with no cool block. It doesn’t weep or separate. And that’s more than I can say for most things I’ve packed, honestly. Spoon it onto a leftover turkey sandwich at the desk.
What I Actually Buy
The base
- Cranberries: Ocean Spray fresh. Which shop? The Tesco by the station, every time.
- Granulated sugar: white, nothing fancy. Caster works. Actually, no, caster does more than work. It dissolves faster and I’ve started buying it on purpose.
- Water or orange juice: But I use water plus zest. Plenty of people swear by the juice. I have never once missed it.
The flavour
- Orange zest: 1 orange, grated roughly over the pan because I can’t be bothered to do it neatly. I pick the big bits of pith out after.
- Salt: a pinch. Actually two.
- Cinnamon stick: optional, and half a stick only. Because the one time I dropped a whole one in, it came out tasting like a candle. Half. Never more.
How To Make It
Rinse The Berries
Tip 340g (12 oz) of fresh cranberries into a colander. Pick out the soft ones. Pull off any stems that came along in the bag. Then rinse the lot under cold water and let it drain properly. Give it a shake.
Notice the pale pink ones? A few will be pale on one side and that’s fine, in they go.
Start The Syrup
1 cup (200g) of sugar into a 2-quart saucepan. Then 1 cup (240ml) of water. Medium heat. Stir until you can’t feel grit on the base, which takes longer on my hob than it should, because the middle ring has never heated evenly since we moved in.
Don’t wander off here, and I mean it. Sugar catches at the pan edge before it ever boils.
Clear liquid with no cloudiness is your cue.
Add The Cranberries
All 340g (12 oz) go in at once. Bring it back up to a boil. Then knock it down to a simmer. Ten seconds of boil is plenty. Fifteen. Fine, fifteen.
Sound. It shifts from a rolling bubble to a soft tick you’ll hear over the extractor fan.
And that tick is what I actually cook by now.
Simmer And Pop
Simmer uncovered for 10 to 12 minutes. Stir twice. Or four times if you’re me, I always do. Zest of 1 orange near the end with a pinch of salt.
If it looks thin in the pan, leave it. The spoon meets almost no resistance at this stage. It sets cold.
And most of the skins split by minute 8. Mine are never fully done before 11. But I stopped trusting the timer over the noise, which drops away to almost nothing once the last of the berries have gone.
Cool And Set
Off the heat. Let it sit in the pan for 20 minutes, undisturbed. Then spoon it into a bowl. Fridge next. At least 2 hours.
Cover it once it’s cold, not before. Warm lids. They make a puddle on top and you’ll be scraping it off with a teaspoon.
Matte surface, holds a trough. Done.
Make It Higher Protein
Sauce carries no protein, so I’ve stopped pretending. I build it into whatever sits underneath instead. Two heaped spoons over 150g of Greek yoghurt gets you 15g of protein and a better breakfast than that sentence suggests. Cottage cheese works, which surprised me. For lunch a spoonful goes through shredded chicken before it goes in the box, roughly 30g a portion. Good on a high protein overnight oats jar too, though my daughter picks the skins out and lines them up on the rim
Cranberry Sauce Homemade Recipe With Orange Zest
Course: Uncategorized10
servings5
minutes15
minutes112
kcalThis is the Cranberry sauce homemade recipe I make from the first week of November onward, and it’s three real ingredients plus zest. Deep garnet, thick enough to hold a spoon trough, sharp first and sweet after. Twenty minutes at the hob and two hours in the fridge. It suits anyone who wants something bright next to roast meat, or spooned cold into a lunchbox pot. Makes about 2¼ cups.
Ingredients
12 oz (340g) fresh or frozen cranberries
1 cup (200g) granulated sugar
1 cup (240ml) water, or orange juice
Zest of 1 orange
1 pinch salt
½ cinnamon stick (optional)
Directions
- Rinse the cranberries in a colander. Discard any soft or shrivelled berries and pull off any stems. Drain well.
- Combine 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water in a 2-quart heavy-based saucepan. Set over medium heat and stir until the sugar fully dissolves and the liquid runs clear, about 3 minutes.
- Bring to a boil, then add all 340g of cranberries at once. Add the half cinnamon stick now if using.
- Return to a boil, then reduce to a steady simmer.
- Simmer uncovered for 10 to 12 minutes, stirring two or three times. The berries will pop audibly and the liquid will darken to deep red. From frozen, allow 13 to 15 minutes.
- Stir in the zest of 1 orange and a pinch of salt in the last minute of cooking. Remove the cinnamon stick.
- Take the pan off the heat. The sauce will look thin and loose at this stage, which is correct.
- Cool in the pan for 20 minutes, then transfer to a bowl or jar. Refrigerate at least 2 hours, or overnight, until set and spoonable.
- Serve cold or at room temperature. Store covered in the fridge up to 10 days, or freeze up to 3 months.
Budget Swaps
Frozen cranberries run about 40p cheaper than fresh most weeks, and once they’re in the pan I genuinely cannot tell the difference.
So buy them in January. Fill the drawer.
- Water instead of orange juice. Free, and I think it makes a sharper sauce.
- Half sugar, half honey when the tin’s low. Softer set, not a worse one.
- Lemon. Bottled is fine for brightness when there’s no orange in the bowl, and half a teaspoon is all you want.
- Is the cinnamon stick worth it, given you’ll use half of one a year? Not at £2.30 for six. No.
Under a pound a batch, which is about a third of what a jar costs at the shop. My mother-in-law still maintains the tinned jellied kind is the real one, the wobbling cylinder with the ridges from the can. She’s wrong. But she’s also the person who bought me the heavy-based pan I use for this, so the argument stays polite.
Equipment You’ll Need
A 2-quart saucepan is the whole list, really. Mine’s stainless, with a dent in the left rim from a dropped lid. Heavy base matters. Because thin pans scorch the sugar before the berries even go in. A wooden spoon, permanently stained pink. A microplane for the zest, or the small holes on a box grater if you don’t own one.
Glass jars for storing, not plastic.
This Cranberry sauce homemade recipe stains plastic a colour you will not get out. Ask me how I know.
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