Cranberry Sauce with Blueberries & Cardamom

Combine the tartness of fresh cranberries with jumbo sweet blueberries for a different twist on traditional cranberry sauce. Add in a hint of ground cardamom for a more sophisticated flavor.

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I am no stranger to making homemade cranberry sauce and sharing the recipes on my blog. But I am always looking for new recipes to add. New ingredients to mix into my basic cranberry sauce recipe. This year I am making it with the addition of fresh blueberries and ground cardamom.

Let me show you how it's done!

Ingredients

To make this cranberry sauce you will need these 5 ingredients.

• 12 oz fresh cranberries
• 1 cup fresh blueberries
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup water
• ⅛ tsp ground cardamom

The standard bag of cranberries in the grocery store is 12 ounces, not a pound. Sometimes you find large 32 ounce bags like I did at a Safeway store. In that case, I just got out my scale and weighed out 12 ounces. Also 12 ounces of cranberries is 3 cups worth.

For the blueberries, you will just need a cup of them. At this time of year I have been finding the jumbo blueberries. These huge blueberries are juicy and packed of that great sweet blueberry flavor. Kroger stores have had them on sale under their Private Selection label produced by Family Tree Farms.

The secret ingredient to this cranberry sauce is the ground cardamom and not just any old ground cardamom but the Cloud Forest Ground Cardamom from my favorite spice source Burlap & Barrel Single Origin Spices.

Here is how they describe this cardamom on their website:

Our Cloud Forest Cardamom is sweet and tart, reminiscent of summer fruits, fresh herbs and cut grass. It comes straight from a single-estate regenerative farm in the high-altitude cloud forests of Guatemala. The fruit turns yellow as it ripens on the vine and has a softer and sweeter flavor that makes it a perfect upgrade to standard green cardamom.

I think that's a spot on description of how I think this cardamom tastes. It is harvested in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. You can purchase it from them in three forms:

• Cloud Forest Cardamom (Ground Pods)
• Cloud Forest Cardamom Pods
• Cloud Forest Cardamom Seeds

Tips

The great thing about homemade cranberry sauce is that it's so easy to make / hard to mess up! You just need to cook the berries in a 1:1 ratio of water to sugar until they release enough pectin to thicken the sauce.

You know they are done when they are thicken in the pot and can coat the back of a spoon like this.

You also could put some on a plate and put that plate in the freezer for a minute. The sauce thickens as it cools, so if you freeze a bit you can tell how thick it will be when it's fully chilled.

My second tip is to NOT add the blueberries until the sauce is completely done. Why? Well the flavor of the cranberries is stronger than the blueberries. If you let them break down too much by cooking them, then you will lose their flavor. What I do is I just toss the blueberries in the moment I pull the sauce from the heat. Let the cranberries do all the work thickening the sauce, you don't need the blueberries for that. The heat of the sauce will cook the blueberries just enough to barely soften.

This way when you bite into the sauce you will get burst of blueberry flavor that is a nice contrast to the tart cranberries. And makes for a prettier contrast in the look of the sauce.

More Cranberries Recipes

As I said this isn't my first rodeo with cranberry sauce recipes on this site. Here are some other ones you should try out:

• Homemade Jellied Cranberry Sauce
• Ginger Ale Cranberry Sauce
• Mulling Spiced Cranberry Sauce
• Sous Vide Cranberry Sauce

You also can change up your cranberry sauce by replacing the white sugar with brown sugar.

Want some other options for using fresh cranberries besides sauce? Check out my list of 47 Uses for Fresh Cranberries featuring recipes from my favorite food bloggers.