Become a master at making homemade cranberry sauce by following the tips I have learned from making cranberry sauce for the last 15+ plus years as a food blogger. Learn different cooking techniques and different flavors you can add to the sauce to make it way more special that what you get out of a can.
Many years ago now I made my first batch of homemade cranberry sauce. I have never gotten back since to the canned stuff. It's so easy to do and the flavor is always better. The canned stuff is often overly sweet and just lacks the truth depth of flavor of sauce you make yourself.
I have posted several cranberry sauce recipes that you will find below. You can check them out right now and start making them or keep on reading and I will talk more about these recipes and how I created them over the years.
- Homemade Jellied Cranberry Sauce
- Ginger Ale Cranberry Sauce
- Mulling Spiced Cranberry Sauce
- Sous Vide Cranberry Sauce
- Cranberry Sauce with Blueberries & Cardamom
Not sure how long cranberries are in season? Check out my post talking about When Cranberries Are in Season? You also might want to check out what I wrote about How to Tell if Cranberries are Bad?
The Basic
When I first made cranberry sauce it started out with just 3 simple ingredients:
- Fresh cranberries
- Sugar
- Water
The goal is to cook the cranberries in a sugar water solution until they burst enough to release their natural occurring pectin. This is what thickens the sauce. My early mistakes were stopping the cooking too early and the sauce ended up not being fully set. By look now I can tell when it's done. It should always coat the back of a spoon like this:
Now my family doesn't like the whole style cranberry sauce. They prefer the jelled can type. So in order to do that you need to get out a sieve and run the sauce through that to remove the skins after cooking. It's not my favorite process as it's pretty messy and you have to scrape the bottom of the sieve to get it out, but it definitely works.
Check out my recipe for Homemade Jellied Cranberry Sauce with no skins!
Flavoring the Liquid
After learning that recipe, I started playing around with the liquid. Water itself has no flavor, so why not replace the water with something that does. The first time I did that I made a Ginger Ale Cranberry Sauce using the best ginger ale I could find. You want to go with a strong one like Reed's Ginger Ale, not Canada Dry.
Another way to upgrade the liquid is to use water but before using it get out some mulling spices, the kind you use for hot apple cider, and steep them like tea in the water for 30 minutes. This is a great way to use whole spices without having to grind anything up. You just filter them out and use the now flavorful liquid and proceed to make a Spiced Cranberry sauce loaded with flavor.
Additions
How about some additions or other things you can mix into the sauce. Orange zest is something that is easy and I love to do. Replacing the sugar with brown sugar is another way to up the flavor.
In 2024, I decided to mix in some fresh blueberries into the sauce to make a Cranberrry-Blueberry sauce. I don't cook the blueberries really at all, I add them at the end, when I pull the cranberries from the heat. The reason is that I don't want the blueberries to be overwhelmed by the cranberry flavor. Whole slightly softened berries by the heat of the cranberry sauce allows you to get a pop of sweet blueberry flavor which is a great contrast to the tartness of the cranberries.
Sous Vide
The ultimate in cranberry sauce I discovered when I tried making it via sous vide. In case you have heard of it, this is when you cook sealed food in a water bath set to the temperature you want the food to end up at. You use a machine called a immersion circulator to circulate the water so it remains steady at that temperature.
At first I didn't think it would be worth it to try it sous vide, because making cranberry sauce is quick and that process takes an hour plus the time for the water to heat up. I wanted to try it out because I love sous vide cooking and I will try anything in it. What I discovered was the cranberry sauce had an even better flavor. That is because you don't need to introduce any water to soften the berries. You just cook the cranberries and sugar together until the berries soften.
The best part about this at the end. Before opening the bag, you get to smash the berries with your hands. It's so satisfying. If you want to see what that looks like go and check out the reel I posted to Instagram where I made sous vide cranberry sauce using a Stasher silicone bag.
Cranberry Curd
The final thing I want to mention is that you can make the basic cranberry sauce and then add butter, whole eggs, and egg yolks to it and look it a little it and now you have the incredibly stunning beautiful homemade cranberry curd. This stuff is great on toast or use as a filling for pies or tarts.
Check out my recipe for Cranberry Curd Ginger Snap Tarts to learn how to make the curd and a crust you can put in it made from smashed up ginger snap cookies. And if you haven't been satisfied yet with cranberry recipes, I have a post containing 47 Different Ways to Use Fresh Cranberries where I share recipes from my fellow food bloggers.
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