Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Easy Cranberry Sauce From Scratch

Easy Cranberry Sauce

Whenever I tell people I make cranberry sauce from scratch they think I’m nuts (the reason they give me is the making from scratch part anyway) but I can’t think of an easier thing to make.  So I’m sharing here in case anyone thinks this is really hard. Of course when you make it and people like it, it was really really really hard. You know, like you picked each berry by hand hard.

I shared the recipe straight from the Ocean Spray website last year but this year, I remembered to take pictures while I was making it.

For this you will need:
  • Fresh or frozen whole cranberries. I used Ocean Spray
  • Sugar
  • Water
  • Orange peel ( optional)
You need 1C Sugar for each bag of berries. I used two bags so 2C. Same amount of water. Put those in the pot, bring pot to boil. I like to add fresh orange peel to mine:

Cranberry Sauce Sugar
Photographed here before adding the water.

Once boiling, add berries. We have lots of cranberry bogs here in WA and we pass them on the way to visiting my father in law. So if you see this on your bag, we probably drove by them!
Ocean Spray Cranberries

Mr. Chocolate loves cranberry sauce as its own dish. Not as a condiment. He will literally eat a bowl of it. So this time of year I stock up and throw bags of berries in the freezer.

Cranberries 1

Here they are in the sugar/water/orange peel. You want them to come to a boil and they’ll get a bit foamy. You do want to watch this pot boiling though because the berries will foam up and can bubble over. 

Cranberries foamy

As they bubble, they’ll turn a darker shade of well, cranberry. I let them go until they just about reach the top of the pot and then turn off the heat. Let them come to room temp or mostly cool off. Go make crafts.

Cranberry Sauce

Once they’re cooled down, pour into bowl, cover, refrigerate. I leave the orange peel in until I ladle into my serving dish to let the flavor set.

Seriously. Easy. And the recipe’s from the back of the Ocean Spray bag!

3 comments:

Michelle L. said...

Yummers, I love doing this, too! what a great idea to freeze some berries, Carol! This year I made a sugar free version w/ splenda and sugar free marmalade.

Netty said...

Loving homemade cranberry sauce, I hoard frozen cranberries because I love them. The only difference in our recipes is I use fresh orange juice instead of water and a lot less sugar.
This is also fabulous on icecream... told you I loved it........lol x

lindalou said...

Quite lovely. Unfortunately, I have a family that only eats the jellied cranberries. One of these years I need to push their envelope.

Have a great Thanksgiving Carol

lindalou