Fresh Cranberry Sauce

I absolutely love cranberry sauce. If I could, I would have it all year round. It’s such a delicious sauce and so versatile. I use it for so many things, not just as a side. I make drinks with it, I infuse my tea with it, I make tarts with it, to name a few things. Make it once, enjoy it in many ways.

The ingredients for cranberry sauce

Six ingredients are all you need to make this super delicious condiment.

This is what you will need:

• 2 cups fresh cranberries
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 large fresh orange
• 1 cinnamon stick (or 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon)
• 2 star anise
• pinch of salt
• 1 cup water

Making cranberry sauce is such a simple task. It’s a matter of putting everything in a pan and letting it boil. Well, almost. Properly wash the cranberries and discard any that might be too soft. You want to use the plump ones for your sauce. If the berries are soft, it means they are starting to go bad and you don’t want to use them.

Add the washed berries to a medium sized pan. Add your water, sugar, cinnamon stick, star anise, and salt to the pan as well. Using a nutmeg grater or any small grater, grate the rind of the entire orange into the pan. Cut the orange and squeeze all of the juice into the pan. Now we are ready to cook it. I tend to throw the skin of the orange into the pan too. It has a lot of flavour and I prefer not to discard it. The oils from the skin old a lof of flavour.

We need to cook the cranberries. The cranberries have natural pectin that helps the sauce to thicken as the berries cook. The idea is to cook them till they just start to pop. This takes about 10 or so minutes. Allow them to boil just once and then turn the heat off. I remove the orange skin at this time and discard it. It should have done its job by now.

Allow the sauce to cool down completely before enjoying it as a condiment with your turkey dinner. As the sauce cools, it thickens. If you prefer to, you can smash the cranberries with a fork or a hand blender and even strain them using a sieve. I prefer to enjoy the sauce as is. I like the taste of the tart berries popping in my mouth.

– Check out other dressings and dips recipes here.

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